air, seeing the hoar frost sparkle everywhere, I felt as if all nature shared in the joy of the great Birthday.  Going through the woods, the softness of my tread upon the mossy ground and among the brown leaves enhanced the Christmas sacredness by which I felt surrounded.  As the whitened stems environed me, I thought how the Founder of the time had never raised his benignant hand, save to bless and heal, except in the case of one unconscious tree.”

Now we found ourselves on the same ground, surrounded by the full beauty of the summer-time.  The hand of Art conspiring with Nature had planted rhododendrons, as if in their native soil beneath the forest-trees.  They were in one universal flame of blossoms, as far as the eye could see.  Lord and Lady D——­, the kindest and most hospitable of neighbors, were absent; there was not a living figure beside ourselves to break the solitude, and we wandered on and on with the wild birds for companions as in our native wildernesses.  By and by we came near Cobham Hall, with its fine lawns and far-sweeping landscape, and workmen and gardeners and a general air of summer luxury.  But to-day we were to go past the hall and lunch on a green slope under the trees, (was it just the spot where Mr. Pickwick tried the cold punch and found it satisfactory?  I never liked to ask!) and after making the old woods ring with the clatter and clink of our noontide meal, mingled with floods of laughter, were to come to the village, and to the very inn from which the disconsolate Mr. Tupman wrote to Mr. Pickwick, after his adventure with Miss Wardle.  There is the old sign, and here we are at the Leather Bottle, Cobham, Kent.  “There’s no doubt whatever about that.”  Dickens’s modesty would not allow him to go in, so we made the most of an outside study of the quaint old place as we strolled by; also of the cottages whose inmates were evidently no strangers to our party, but were cared for by them as English cottagers are so often looked after by the kindly ladies in their neighborhood.  And there was the old churchyard, “where the dead had been quietly buried ‘in the sure and certain hope’ which Christmas-time inspired.”  There too were the children, whom, seeing at their play, he could not but be loving, remembering who had loved them!  One party of urchins swinging on a gate reminded us vividly of Collins, the painter.  Here was his composition to the life.  Every lover of rural scenery must recall the little fellow on the top of a five-barred gate in the picture Collins painted, known widely by the fine engraving made of it at the time.  And there too were the blossoming gardens, which now shone in their new garments of resurrection.  The stillness of midsummer noon crept over everything as we lingered in the sun and shadow of the old village.  Slowly circling the hall, we came upon an avenue of lime-trees leading up to a stately doorway in the distance.  The path was overgrown, birds and squirrels were hopping unconcernedly