cealed from their view? Irwin felt all this when he thought of his country; and he blushed for her iniquity: but she was his country, and with all her faults he loved her still." In every other land he was an exile; in her he was at home, if, indeed, the Christian can be truly said to have any home but heaven.

The allotted period of Irwin's absence at length expired; and, after three years spent in the culture of a mind rich with natural advantages, though suffered long to remain a desolate wilderness, he hailed with joy the vessel which was destined to convey him back to Britain, to his country. He had quitted her with regret, and he returned to her with delight. He had gleaned the harvest of the mind in all the most cultivated nations of Europe and Asia; but he had found something wanting in them all; something which the Laplander finds only in his fields of ice; the Indian nowhere but in his sun-burnt wilds; and what that was Irwin felt, when, landing joyously upon his native soil, he realized the beautiful words of the poet :

There is a land, of every land the pride,
Belov'd of Heav'n o'er all the world beside;
Where brighter suns dispense serener light,
And milder moons emparadise the night:
There is a spot of earth supremely blest;
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest:
Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found?
Art thou a man? a patriot? look around:

Oh! thou shalt find where'er thy footsteps roam,
That land thy country, and that spot thy home.

HENRY IRWIN and his young friends met with that warm, sincere, and unreserved delight, which the youthful mind experiences before its energies have been restrained by suspicion, or its sensibilities chilled by disappointment: and it was with an unconcealed feeling of satisfaction that he accepted Mrs. Ellars's hospitable invitation to make her house his home, during his stay in London. In their little circle he immediately became familiarized, and no stranger would have imagined that he had not always formed a part of it; while the equal kindness of his manner to each individual would have impressed the belief that he claimed Mrs. Ellars as his mother, and the rest as his brother and sisters. Mrs. Ellars, indeed, seldom joined even in the family circle: a delicate state of health most frequently confined her to the solitude of her own apartment: if that could

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be called solitude which ever brought her into communion with her best, her everlasting Friend. When she did mix in society, she spoke little; for the many sorrows she had seen had cast a shade (not of melancholy, but) of more than common seriousness over her disposition, which made her not merely shrink from every species of trifling, but even avoid all conversation which tended not to immediate profit: but when she thought her opinion or her counsel might prove of advantage, she was never silent; and she found a willing and able second in Henry Irwin. With him she delighted to converse when her strength permitted; and, when that was not the case, she found pleasure in the certainty that her young charge had now a friend who was amply qualified to supply her own place, to counsel in difficulty, and to caution in danger.

On Percy's account, this acquaintance gave her peculiar pleasure; for she thought it not mpossible that the advice, and still more the .example of one who was his senior in age, and his superior in ability, might have a beneficial influence on the course of his whole future

life and had Percy not been in love, this might have been the case; for he respected Irwin even when he was inclined to quarrel with him. As it was, however, he saw every word and action in a distorted view; as not so much designed for his advantage as to strengthen Irwin's own interest in Flora Percy; for Seyton had fallen into the common error of lovers, that of supposing every one as much in love as themselves. He had not, therefore, a doubt but that Irwin had long before resigned his heart to the charms which he had himself found irresistible: thus look

ing upon his friend as his rival, the eye of jealousy cast such a shade upon his simplest actions and even looks, that Percy, at times, almost lost patience, while Irwin, who was totally unconscious of any cause of disagreement between them, often made his anger burn more fiercely, by turning what he thought Seyton's affected pettishness into a subject of mirth, a conduct which the poor lover thought implied an ungenerous triumphing over his weakness; yet, at other times, when he saw his friend's unwearied