couch in the cover, and Lucy was folded to her father's heart. The forgiveness was felt to be holy in that embrace. The day had brightened up into more perfect beauty, and showers were sporting with sunshine on the blue air of Spring. The sky showed something like a rainbow-and the Lake, in some parts quite still, and in some breezy, contained at once shadowy fragments of wood and rock, and waves that would have murmured round the prow of pleasure-boat suddenly hoisting a sail. And such a very boat appeared round a promontory that stretched no great way into the water, and formed with a crescent of low meadow-land a bay that was the first to feel the wind coming down Glencoin. The boatman was rowing heedlessly along, when a sudden squall struck the sail, and in an instant the skiff was upset and went down. No shrieks were heard and the boatman swam ashore; but a figure was seen struggling where the sail disappeared and starting from his knees, he who knew not fear plunged into the Lake, and after desperate exertions brought the drowned creature to the side—a female meanly attired— seemingly a stranger and so attenuated that it was plain she must have been in a dying state, and had she not thus perished, would have had but few days to live. The hair was grey-but the face, though withered, was not old—and as she lay on the greensward, the features were beautiful as well as calm in the sunshine.

He stood over her awhile as if struck motionless and then kneeling beside the body, kissed its lips and eyes — and said only, "It is Lucy!"

uncon

The old man was close by-and so was that child. They too knelt — and the passion of the mourner held him dumb, with his face close to the face of death ghastly its glare beside the sleep that knows no waking, and is forsaken by all dreams. He opened the bosom-wasted to the bone-in the idle thought that she might yet breathe and a paper dropt out into his hand, which he read aloud to himself scious that any one was near. "I am fast dying-and desire to die at your feet. Perhaps you will spurn me -it is right you should; but you will see how sorrow has killed the wicked wretch who was once your wife. I have lived in humble servitude for five years, and have suffered great hardships. I think I am a penitent and have been told by

religious persons that I may hope for pardon from Heaven! Oh! that you would forgive me too! and let me have one look at our Lucy. I will linger about the Field of Flowers-perhaps you will come there, and see me lie down and die on the very spot where we passed a summer day the week of our marriage.' "Not thus could I have kissed thy lips-Lucy had they been red with life. White are they - and white must they long have been! No pollution on them-nor on that poor bosom now. Contrite tears had long since washed out thy

sin. A feeble hand traced these lines-and in them a humble heart said nothing but God's truth. Child- behold your mother. Art thou afraid to touch the dead?"

"No-father-I am not afraid to kiss her lips-as you did now. Sometimes, when you thought me asleep, I have heard you praying for my mother."

"Oh! child! cease-cease-or my heart will burst.”

People began to gather about the body-but awe kept them aloof; and as for removing it to a house, none who saw it but knew such care would have been vain, for doubt there could be none that there lay death. So the groups remained for a while at a distance-even the old pastor went a good many paces apart; and under the shadow of that tree the father and child composed her limbs, and closed her eyes, and continued to sit beside her, as still as if they had been watching over one asleep.

That death was seen by all to be a strange calamity to him who had lived long among them-had adopted many of their customs-and was even as one of themselves-so it seemed in the familiar intercourse of man with man. Some dim notion that this was the dead body of his wife was entertained by many, they knew not why; and their clergyman felt that then there needed to be neither concealment nor avowal of the truth. So in solemn sympathy they approached the body and its watchers; a bier had been prepared: and walking at the head, as if it had been a funeral, the Father of little Lucy holding her hand, silently directed the procession towards his own house-out of the FIELD of Flowers.

COTTAGES.

HAVE you any intention, dear reader, of building a house in the country? If you have, pray, for your own sake and ours, let it not be a Cottage. We presume that you are obliged to live, one half of the year at least, in a town. Then why change altogether the character of your domicile and your establishment? You are an inhabitant of Edinburgh, and have a house in the Circus, or Heriot Row, or Abercromby Place, or Queen Street. The said house has five or six stories, and is such a palace as one might expect in the City. of Palaces. Your drawing-rooms can, at a pinch, hold some ten score of modern Athenians-your dining-room might feast one half of the contributors to Blackwood's Magazine-your "placens uxor" has her boudoir-your eldest daughter, now verging on womanhood, her music-room-your boys their own studio-the governess her retreat-and the tutor his denthe housekeeper sits like an overgrown spider in her own sanctum-the butler bargains for his dim apartment-and the four maids must have their front area-window. In short. from cellarage to garret all is complete, and Number Fortytwo is really a splendid mansion.

Now, dear reader, far be it from us to question the propriety or prudence of such an establishment. Your house was not built for nothing-it was no easy thing to get the painters out the furnishing thereof was no trifle-the feuduty is really unreasonable-and taxes are taxes still, notwithstanding the principles of free trade, and the universal prosperity of the country. Servants are wasteful, and their wages absurd-and the whole style of living, with longnecked bottles, most extravagant. But still we do not object to your establishment-far from it, we admire it much; nor is there a single house in town where we make ourselves more

agreeable to a late hour, or that we leave with a greater quantity of wine of a good quality under our girdle. Few things would give us more temporary uneasiness, than to hear of any embarrassment in your money concerns. We are not people to forget good fare, we assure you; and long and far may all shapes of sorrow keep aloof from the hospitable board, whether illuminated by gas, oil, or mutton.

But what we were going to say is this-that the head of such a house ought not to live, when ruralising, in a Cottage. He ought to be consistent. Nothing so beautiful as consistency. What then is so absurd as to cram yourself, your wife, your numerous progeny, and your scarcely less numerous menials, into a concern called a Cottage? The ordinary heat of a baker's oven is very few degrees above that of a brown study, during the month of July, in a substantial, low-roofed Cottage. Then the smell of the kitchen! How it aggravates the sultry closeness! A strange, compounded, inexplicable smell of animal, vegetable, and mineral matter. It is at the worst during the latter part of the forenoon, when everything has been got into preparation for cookery. There is then nothing savoury about the smell—it is dull, dead-almost catacombish. A small back-kitchen has it in its power to destroy the sweetness of any Cottage. Add a scullery, and the three are omnipotent. Of the eternal clashing of pots, pans, plates, trenchers, and general crockery, we now say nothing; indeed, the sound somewhat relieves the smell, and the ear comes occasionally in to the aid of the nose. Such noises are windfalls; but not so the scolding of cook and butler-at first low and tetchy, with pauses-then sharp, but still interrupted-by-and-by, loud and ready in reply— finally a discordant gabble of vulgar fury, like maniacs quarrelling in Bedlam. Hear it you must-you and all the strangers. To explain it away is impossible; and your fear is, that Alecto, Tisiphone, or Megæra, will come flying into the parlour with a bloody cleaver, dripping with the butler's brains. During the time of the quarrel the spit has been standing still, and a gigot of the five-year-old black-face burnt on one side to a cinder.-"To dinner with what appetite you may."

It would be quite unpardonable to forget one especial smell which irretrievably ruined our happiness during a whole sum

mer-the smell of a dead rat. The accursed verinin died somewhere in the Cottage; but whether beneath a floor, within lath and plaster, or in roof, baffled the conjectures of the most sagacious. The whole family used to walk about the Cottage for hours every day, snuffing on a travel of discovery; and we distinctly remember the face of one elderly maidenlady at the moment she thought she had traced the source of the fumée to the wall behind a window-shutter. But even at the very same instant we ourselves had proclaimed it with open nostril from a press in an opposite corner. Terriers were procured-but the dog Billy himself would have been at fault. To pull down the whole Cottage would have been difficult at least to build it up again would have been so; so we had to submit. Custom, they say, is second nature, but not when a dead rat is in the house. No, none can ever become accustomed to that; yet good springs out of evil-for the live rats could not endure it, and emigrated to a friend's house, about a mile off, who has never had a sound night's rest from that day. We have not revisited our Cottage for several years but time does wonders, and we were lately told by a person of some veracity that the smell was then nearly gone; but our informant is a gentleman of blunted olfactory nerves, having been engaged from seventeen to seventy in a soap-work.

Smoke too More especially that mysterious and infernal sort, called back-smoke! The old proverb, "No smoke without fire," is a base lie. We have seen smoke without fire in every room in a most delightful Cottage we inhabited during the dog-days. The moment you rushed for refuge even into a closet, you were blinded and stifled; nor shall we ever forget our horror on being within an ace of smotheration in the cellar. At last, we groped our way into the kitchen. Neither cook nor jack was visible. We heard, indeed, a whirring and revolving noise-and then suddenly Girzie swearing through the mist. Yet all this while people were admiring our Cottage from a distance, and especially this self-same. accursed back-smoke, some portions of which had made an excursion up the chimneys, and was wavering away in a spiral form to the sky, in a style captivating to Mr Price on the Picturesque.

No doubt, there are many things very romantic about a