On one side, fancifully decorated with shells and spars, mosses and creeping plants, was discovered a building, between hermitage and summer pavilion; on the other waved a copse of larches, exhaling that spicy and peculiar fragrance which the autumnal wind brings from out the fir. Two little passages, cut into stairs of turf, wound uniformly to the level sward which made the foreground of the landscape. At the end of this was a sundial, whereon the moon fell with sufficient brightness to reveal the hour: beside was a fountain, whose waters trickled with a low perpetual song, from the rough lips of its carved basin, into a large reservoir, moulded from fragments of stone, sea-shells, and gnarled roots of trees bound with a growth of weeds and wild creepers. Southward, the lawn lay open to a pleasure garden, but the flowers were now but few, and those of the faintest hue and perfume. The gorgeous reds and yellows which herald decay, were beginning to touch the forest foliage; and the limes, in which autumn's first symptoms are so lovely, looked in the pale light as if covered with primrose blossoms.
Throughout the garden there was, indeed,
