CHAPTER XI.
I boast no song in magic wonders rife; But yet, O Nature! is there nought to prize, Familiar in thy bosom scenes of life?
And dwells in daylight truth's salubrious skies No form with which the soul may sympathize?
Young, innocent, on whose sweet forehead mild The parted ringlet shone in simplest guise, An inmate in the home of Albert smiled, Or blessed his noonday walk,--she was his only child.
Gertrude of Wyoming.
O time, thou hast played strange tricks with us; and we bless the stars that made us a novelist, and permit us now to retaliate.

Leaving Paul to the instructions of Augustus Tomlinson and the festivities of the Jolly Angler, and suffering him, by slow but sure degrees, to acquire the graces and the reputation of the accomplished and perfect appropriator of other men's possessions, we shall pass over the lapse of years with the same heedless rapidity with which they have glided over us, and summon our reader to a very different scene from those which would be likely to greet his eyes, were he following the adventures of our new Telemachus.

Nor wilt thou, dear reader, whom we make the umpire between ourself and those who never read,--the critics; thou who hast, in the true spirit of gentle breeding, gone with us among places where the novelty of the scene has, we fear, scarcely atoned for the coarseness, not giving thyself the airs of a dainty abigail,--not prating, lacquey-like, on the low company thou has met,--nor wilt thou, dear and friendly reader, have cause to dread that we shall weary thy patience by a "damnable iteration" of the same localities.

Pausing for a moment to glance over the divisions of our story, which lies before us like a map, we feel that we may promise in future to conduct thee among aspects of society more familiar to thy habits; where events flow to their allotted gulf through landscapes of more pleasing variety and among tribes of a more luxurious civilization.
Upon the banks of one of fair England's fairest rivers, and about fifty miles distant from London, still stands an old-fashioned abode, which we shall here term Warlock Manorhouse.

It is a building of brick, varied by stone copings, and covered in great part with ivy and jasmine.