were only sufficient to render the torn and ragged evidences of poverty, and its attendant—­carelessness—­more conspicuous.  He left the knoll, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and putting it into his waistcoat pocket, ascended a larger hill, which led to the grave-yard, where his child lay buried.  On his way to this hill, which stood about half a mile distant, he passed a few houses of an humble description, with whose inhabitants he had been well acquainted.  Some of these stood nearly as he remembered them; but others were roofless, with their dark mud gables either fallen in or partially broken down.  He surveyed their smoke-colored walls with sorrow; and looked, with a sense of the transient character of all man’s works upon the chickweed, docks, and nettles, which had shot up so rankly on the spot where many a chequered scene of joy and sorrow had flitted over the circumscribed circle of humble life, ere the annihilating wing of ruin swept away them and their habitations.

When he had ascended the hill, his eye took a wider range.  The more distant and picturesque part of the country lay before him.  “Ay!” said he in a soliloquy, “Lord bless us, how sthrange is this world!—­an’ what poor crathurs are men!  There’s the dark mountains, the hills, the rivers, an’ the green glens, all the same; an’ nothin’ else a’most but’s changed!  The very song of that blackbird, in the thorn-bushes an’ hazels below me, is like the voice of an ould friend to my ears.  Och, indeed, hardly that, for even the voice of man changes; but that song is the same as I heard it for the best part o’ my life.  That mornin’ star, too, is the same bright crathur up there that it ever was!  God help us!  Hardly any thing changes but man, an’ he seems to think that he can never change; if one is to judge by his thoughtlessness, folly, an’ wickedness!”

A smaller hill, around the base of which went the same imperfect road that crossed the glen of Tubber Derg, prevented him from seeing the grave-yard to which he was about to extend his walk.  To this road he directed his steps.  On reaching it he looked, still with a strong memory of former times, to the glen in which his children, himself, and his ancestors had all, during their day, played in the happy thoughtlessness of childhood and youth.  But the dark and ragged house jarred upon his feelings.  He turned from it with pain, and his eye rested upon the still green valley with evident relief.  He thought of his “buried flower”—­“his-golden-haired darlin’,” as he used to call her—­and almost fancied that he saw her once more wandering waywardly through its tangled mazes, gathering berries, or strolling along the green meadow, with a garland of gowans about her neck.  Imagination, indeed, cannot heighten the image of the dead whom we love; but even if it could, there was no standard of ideal beauty in her father’s mind beyond that of her own.  She had been beautiful; but her beauty was pensive:  a fair yet melancholy child; for the