in precipitous gaiety down the mountain's gorge, even the loud piercing scream of the Bald Eagle emerging from its eyrie, and echoing in terrific shrillness among the rocks, were all calculated to strike a fancy, deeply tinged with romance. Upon the morning I have mentioned, he had ascended one of the highest Peaks of the mountain road, at which point his eye was greeted with a view of unusual splendour. An endless sea of mist rolled in a dense volume far beneath him, and obscured every prospect, except the pinnacles of the surrounding mountains. As it was drifted by the morning breeze, a yawning chasm at times was formed, like the parting of the ocean's wave, and some stupendous trunk rearing its top like the mast of a ship, would seem to climb aloft upon the billow. In the east, the rising sun was emerging from behind an ocean of mist, and rapidly illuminated the whole expanse; the orb of light wheeled his course in fiery splendour, and glowed with strong reflected brilliancy amid the surrounding foam. It was truly a combination of these numerous magnificent scenes which the mountain clime so frequently affords; and to our traveller, it had the effect of arousing all the delightful associations of a highly classical mind. For the moment, past sorrows were forgotten in present delight, and the gloom of his meditations was usurped by the grandeur and sublimity of nature. He gazed upon the scene, till the penetrating heat of the sun dissolved the dense mass of mist, and its retiring waves slowly sinking to the mountain's base, were dissipated in spiral particles. The mountains far dis

tant, loomed and expanded in their mantles of deep blue, and the pinnacles of the Peaks of Otter in the extremity of the landscape, standing out like giants in advance of the other mountains, glowed with burnished splendour.

The sudden contrast of view awakened a new and more melancholy feeling in the stranger's bosom. "Alas! thought he, when will the reviving ray of hope dissipate the black and sombre gloom which now o'ershadows my prospects and my fate; and when shall this face and heart, now pallid with wretchedness, and contracted with misfortune, glow and expand beneath the genial influence of health and happiness?" With a deep sigh, he slowly descended the mountain, and after a short ride reached the watering place, his point of destination. The visitors then attending the Springs were of that multifarious and diversified class which have always flocked to such places from the days of Horace to the present time. There were sick persons who came to drink the waters, and there were well persons who came to eat the viands: there were fortune-hunters and fortune-spenders: there were old maids, who having passed the Rubicon of uncertain age, still dared to look back with a lingering eye to the bowers of love and matrimony: there were young maids, whose only ambition was to figure every day in a new dress, and be helped to a glass of mineral water by half a dozen grinning Macaronies. There were old debauchees, regaining a stock of health for the next winter's campaign, by playing whist all night and drinking brandy all day: there were

young debauchees who were purging off the gorge of wealth obtained by the legal piracy of their sires, by staunch attendance upon the faro tables. There were dilettanti huntsmen and trout fishers, provided with double and single-barreled fusees, patent screws and wipers, orange gunpowder and agate flints, jointed fishing rods and artificial flies; who would hunt all day through the hills, or paddle for hours in the branches, and consider themselves lucky when blessed with a splendid shot or a glorious nibble. There was every scale of society, flats, sharps and naturals; gamblers and horse-jockies, quack doctors and chinquepin lawyers; overbearing nabobs and roguish servants, all mingled in most discordant concord. From the appearance of wealth and fashion which the person and manners of the stranger presented, he was very soon distinguished and intruded upon by all the obsequiousness of attention which is so common at such places. There was, however, an air of mystery and reserve which enveloped him, that was inexplicable; and every effort of complaisance and politeness to develop his name and rank was fruitless. Desperate were the attempts made to bring him open to observation : many were the invitations to sitting parties and walking parties: whist tables and faro-tables, which were extended him, and which were coldly refused. Finding every endeavour to penetrate the stranger's secret, in vain, the company resigned him to his meditations, and gratified their disappointment, with ill tempered remarks, at his expense. The more elderly and cautious dames, seemed fully and instinc

In

tively apprised of his rank and intentions: He was some necessitous fortune-hunter, they well knew, whose air of elegant mystery was only a bait to entrap the affections of some soft-hearted heiress. The younger ones thought him a strange creature, and pretended to care very little about him. The gamblers were divided in their opinions; the one party said he was a pigeon, and a fit subject for plucking; the others swore he was a bite and advised caution in meddling with him. The quack doctor said he looked consumptive, and the lawyer hinted that he was some broken merchant protested in Bank. a short time, however, new pleasures and a constant succession of other society, soon drove all thoughts of the stranger from the minds of the company, and the extreme of courtesy was succeeded by complete neglect. In the mean time, the melancholy Lowlander was vainly struggling against the tide of sorrow and disease which was slowly crushing the springs of his existence, and fretting away the supports of his reason. He was only to be seen by the earliest dawn of the morning and the shadow of twilight, pursuing his solitary path to the Spring, from whose medicinal virtues he sought relief; amid the solitary recesses of the mountain vallies, and in the midnight gloom of his chamber, he held dread communion with the departed shadows of the dead, and anxiously awaited the hour when his own spirit should be released from the bonds of flesh that confined it: And the damp of death upon his forehead, the burning spot upon his cheek, too plainly showed that the day of dissolution was drawing near, and

that all his sorrows, sickness and distress would be relinquished for the eternal rest of the tomb.

He was one morning pursuing his accustomed walk, and chance directed his steps along a narrow valley skirting the range of mountains which encompassed the Springs. He followed the path for a short time, until it led him along the banks of a clear sparkling rivulet which leaped along the base of the mountain. The bubbling of the brook, the harmonious concert of the feathered songsters in the wild grape vines, and the perfume which was exhaled from the forest shrubs and flowers, soothed his harassed mind into a temporary and delightful tranquillity; and having at length become fatigued by his walk, he threw himself upon the green sward beneath the branches of a massive beech. The sweet, though monotonous sounds which murmured around him, and the cooling effect of the mountain breeze upon his fevered brow and cheek, were conducive to a feeling of lassitude and reverie, which gradually subsided into sleep. His slumbering imagination afforded him the most blissful visions; the beloved clime of his nativity, and the conversation with long departed, and far distant friends, with all the enrapturing accompaniments of health and pleasure, were again afforded him. He roved through bowers of myrtle and woodbine, and was transported with ravishing swiftness through the endless regions of space; the air was filled with the melody of the Nightingale, and a thousand flowers sprung up around him. The sun had rolled rapidly around far to the west, and the evening was throw