PASS over the few short weeks of a spring, which, on the whole, we may call cheerful, since it followed so dark a winter, and imagine to yourselves the beautiful region all around Cross-Meikle, clothed once more in the richness and pomp of summer in “the leafy month of June.” The skies are all over bright, dark, sultry blue, without a single cloud; the trees seem to be loaded and bowed down with the luxuriance of their foliage; the shadows lie black beneath them upon the fervid turf; the brook leaves half its rocky channel bare to the sun, but slumbers clear as some large translucent gem within the deep green pool which it never has deserted. All nature pants beneath the sense of her own excessive beauty, and a still low chorus of universal delight is breathed from the surface of all living and inanimate things into the ear of noon.

It was on such a day that Blair proposed to Mrs Campbell that they should take Sarah along with them, and walk over to Semplehaugh, to pay their respects to the good old lady, whose arrival, (from accidental circumstances, deferred longer than was usual,) had taken place the day before, and been announced the same evening, by a message of kind inquiries to the inhabitants of the Manse. Mrs Campbell smiled her consent, and the child, bounding with childish glee, was soon ready to run on the way before them, and open every little gate they had to pass, in their walk through the fields, ere they came up to it. They walked slowly, and were sure never to pass a clump of old shady trees, without lingering in the coolness for a few minutes; yet the distance was not great, and it seemed as if they had scarcely begun their journey ere it was ended.

Mrs Semple did not conceal the pleasure she felt in observing the great improvement that had taken place in the external appearance and bearing of Mr Blair, since she parted from him about the beginning of the year. The accounts she had heard of him in the interim, had prepared her for seeing him even thinner, and paler, and graver, than he had been then; and this added not a little to the agreeableness of the surprise with which she saw how it really was with him now.