scene for love, it should certainly be in the country—a city casts its own care and anxieties on all who tread its busy streets. I have all my life been an indweller of the town, and I frankly confess, for a constant residence, I like it better than all the pastoral charms that ever made the morality of an essay, or gave grace to poetry; still there is that about the country to which the heart always turns with a feeling of freshness and renovation. The moonlight walk through the green wood, would come back upon the memory with a spell which would not belong to a lamp-lighted ramble. The green-leaf would give its freshness, the wild-flower its sweetness; on the ear would arise the murmur of the wind in the boughs—or the song of the brook singing like a child for very gladness. No wonder that Henry Morton was constant to Edith Bellenden. It may be doubted whether absence and distance be half such trials to love, as presence and possession. The remembrance of Edith Bellenden brought to the Scottish exile the scenes of his youth. Hopes long since departed, and some cherished to the last, were linked with her: she was the sweet tie that held him to his country—and his country is all-in-all to a Scotchman. It is a fact, that though a Scotchman be the most locomotive of individuals—there is scarcely a habitable part of the globe where he is not to be found—yet nothing ever weakens his attachment to his country. It is not the pride
