mechanically to a little glen which opened beside it.  It was one of those delightful spots to which the heart clingeth.  Its sloping sides were clothed with patches of wood, on the leaves of which the moonlight glanced with a soft lustre, rendered more beautiful by their stillness.  That side on which the light could not fall, lay in deep shadow, which occasionally gave to the rocks and small projecting precipices an appearance of monstrous and unnatural life.  Having passed through the tangled mazes of the glen, he at length reached its bottom, along which ran a brook, such as in the description of the poet,—­

     ——­In the leafy month of June,
     Unto the sleeping woods all night,
     Singeth a quiet tune.”

Here he stood, and looked upon the green winding margin of the streamlet—­but its song he heard not.  With the workings of a guilty conscience, the beautiful in nature can have no association.  He looked up the glen, but its picturesque windings, soft vistas, and wild underwood mingling with gray rocks and taller trees, all mellowed by the moonbeams, had no charms for him.  He maintained a profound silence—­but it was not the silence of peace or reflection.  He endeavored to recall the scenes of the past day, but could not bring them back to his memory.  Even the fiery tide of thought, which, like burning lava, seared his brain a few moments before, was now cold and hardened.

He could remember nothing.  The convulsion of his mind was over, and his faculties were impotent and collapsed.

In this state he unconsciously retraced his steps, and had again reached the paddock adjoining his house, where, as he thought, the figure of his paramour stood before him.  In a moment his former paroxysm returned, and with it the gloomy images of a guilty mind, charged with the extravagant horrors of brain-stricken madness.

“What!” he exclaimed, “the band still on your forehead!  Tear it off!”

He caught at the form as he spoke, but there was no resistance to his grasp.  On looking again towards the spot it had ceased to be visible.  The storm within him arose once more; he rushed into the kitchen, where the fire blazed out with fiercer heat; again he imagined that the thunder came to his ears, but the thunderings which he heard were only the voice of conscience.  Again his own footsteps and his voice sounded in his fancy as the footsteps and voices of fiends, with which his imagination peopled the room.  His state and his existence seemed to him a confused and troubled dream; he tore his hair—­threw it on the table—­and immediately started back with a hollow groan; for his locks, which but a few hours before had been as black as a raven’s wing, were now white as snow!

On discovering this, he gave a low but frantic laugh.  “Ha, ha, ha!” he exclaimed; “here is another mark—­here is food for despair.  Silently, but surely, did the hand of God work this, as proof that I am hopeless!  But I will bear it; I will bear the sight!  I now feel myself a man blasted by the eye of God Himself!  Ha, ha, ha!  Food for despair!  Food for despair!”