If, indeed, you were now to look upon these two miserable lines of silent and tenantless walls, most of them unroofed, and tumbled into heaps of green ruin, that are fast melting out of shape, for they were mostly composed of mere peat--you would surely say, as the Eastern Vizier said in the apologue.

'God prosper Mr.Valentine M'Clutchy!--for so long as Lord Cumber has him for an agent, he will never want plenty of ruined villages!' My companion muttered many things to himself, but said nothing intelligible, until he came to one of the ruins pretty near the centre:-- "'Ay,' said he, 'here is the place they said he died--here before the door--and in there is where he lay during his long sickness.

The wet thatch and the sods is lying there now.

Many a time I was with him.

Poor Torley!' "'Of whom do you speak now, Raymond ?' I asked.
"'Come away,' he said, not noticing my question,--'come till I show you the other place that the neighbors built privately when he was dying--the father I mean--ay, and the other wid the white head, him that wouldn't waken--come.' "I followed him, for truth to tell, I was sick at heart of all that I had witnessed that morning, and now felt anxious, if I could, to relieve my imagination of this melancholy imagery and its causes altogether.
He went farther up towards the higher mountains, in rather a slanting direction, but not immediately into their darkest recesses, and after a walk of about two miles more, he stopped at the scattered turf walls of what must once have been a cold, damp, and most comfortless cabin.
"'There,' said he, I saw it all; 'twas the blood-hounds.