but it is the foreground that interests and instructs us, like a pleasant gossiping history; and that we had, in old days, from the post-chaise window.  It was more than travelling picquet.  Something of all conditions of life—­luxury and misery—­high spirits and low;—­all sorts of costume, livery, rags, millinery; faces buxom, faces wrinkled, faces kind, faces wicked;—­no end of interest and suggestion, passing in a procession silent and vivid, and all in their proper scenery.  The golden corn-sheafs—­the old dark-alleyed orchards, and the high streets of antique towns.  There were few dreams brighter, few books so pleasant.

We drove by the dark wood—­it always looked dark to me—­where the ‘mausoleum’ stands—­where my dear parents both lay now.  I gazed on its sombre masses not with a softened feeling, but a peculiar sense of pain, and was glad when it was quite past.

All the morning I had not shed a tear.  Good Mary Quince cried at leaving Knowl; Lady Knollys’ eyes were not dry as she kissed and blessed me, and promised an early visit; and the dark, lean, energetic face of the housekeeper was quivering, and her cheeks wet, as I drove away.  But I, whose grief was sorest, never shed a tear.  I only looked about from one familiar object to another, pale, excited, not quite apprehending my departure, and wondering at my own composure.

But when we reached the old bridge, with the tall osiers standing by the buttress, and looked back at poor Knowl—­the places we love and are leaving look so fairy-like and so sad in the clear distance, and this is the finest view of the gabled old house, with its slanting meadow-lands and noble timber reposing in solemn groups—­I gazed at the receding vision, and the tears came at last, and I wept in silence long after the fair picture was hidden from view by the intervening uplands.

I was relieved, and when we had made our next change of horses, and got into a country that was unknown to me, the new scenery and the sense of progress worked their accustomed effects on a young traveller who had lived a particularly secluded life, and I began to experience, on the whole, a not unpleasurable excitement.

Mary Quince and I, with the hopefulness of inexperienced travellers, began already to speculate about our proximity to Bartram-Haugh, and were sorely disappointed when we heard from the nondescript courier—­more like a ostler than a servant, who sat behind in charge of us and the luggage, and represented my guardian’s special care—­at nearly one o’clock, that we had still forty miles to go, a considerable portion of which was across the high Derbyshire mountains, before we reached Bartram-Haugh.

The fact was, we had driven at a pace accommodated rather to the convenience of the horses than to our impatience; and finding, at the quaint little inn where we now halted, that we must wait for a nail or two in a loose shoe of one of our relay, we consulted, and being both hungry, agreed to beguile the time with an early dinner, which we enjoyed very sociably in a queer little parlour with a bow window, and commanding, with a litle garden for foreground, a very pretty landscape.