In the midst of such a scene, no lesser sorrow can prevent our sympathy with Nature.  A calmness, a benevolent disposition seizes us with sweet, insinuating power.  The very brute creation seem sensible of these beauties.  There is a species of mild chearfulness in the face of a lamb, which I have but indifferently expressed in a corner of my paper, and a demure, contented look in an ox, which, in the fear of expressing still worse, I leave unattempted.

“Business calls me away—­I must dispatch my letter.  Yet what does it contain?  No matter—­You like anything better than news.  Indeed, you have never told me so; but I have an intuitive knowledge upon the subject, from the sympathy which I have constantly perceived in the tastes of Julia and Cher Jean.  What is it to you or me,

     “If here in the city we have nothing but riot;
     If the Spitalfield weavers can’t be kept quiet;
     If the weather is fine, or the streets should be dirty;
     Or if Mr. Dick Wilson died aged of thirty?

“But if I was to hearken to the versifying grumbling I feel within me, I should fill my paper, and not have room left to intreat that you would plead my cause with Honora more eloquently than the enclosed letter has the power of doing.  Apropos of verses, you desire me to recollect my random description of the engaging appearance of the charming Mrs.——.  Here it is at your service.

     “Then rustling and bustling the lady comes down,
     With a flaming red face and a broad yellow gown,
     And a hobbling out-of-breath gait, and a frown.

“This little French cousin of our’s, Delarise, was my sister Mary’s playfellow at Paris.  His sprightliness engages my sisters extremely.  Doubtless they tell much of him to you in their letters.

“How sorry I am to bid you adieu!  Oh, let me not be forgot by the friends most dear to you at Lichfield.  Lichfield!  Ah, of what magic letters is that little word composed!  How graceful it looks, when it is written!  Let nobody talk to me of its original meaning, ’The Field of Blood’!  Oh, no such thing!  It is the field of joy!  ’The beautiful city, that lifts her fair head in the valley, and says, I am, and there is none beside me.’ Who says she is vain?  Julia will not say so,—­nor yet Honora,—­and least of all, their devoted

“John Andre.”

It is not difficult to perceive in the tone of this letter that its writer was not an accepted lover.  His interests with the lady, despite Miss Seward’s watchful care, were already declining; and the lapse of a few months more reduced him to the level of a valued and entertaining friend, whose civilities were not to pass the conventional limits of polite intercourse.  To Andre this fate was very hard.  He was hopelessly enamored; and so long as fortune offered him the least hope of eventual success, he persevered in the faith that Honora might yet be his own.  But every returning