his charger with an ease and firmness resulting more from natural grace, and flexibility of limb, than from the practised art of the manège. His eye was clear and even quick, though thought and calmness seemed to belong,, rather than energy or fire, to its general expression-qualities belied neither by the broad imaginative forehead, nor by the firm and slightly-compressed outline of his lips. He wore a small mustache, but neither beard nor whiskers, although both these were common in the last years of the unhappy monarch who at that time swayed the destinies of England. His hair, as was the wont among the higher classes of society, flowed in loose curls, trained with peculiar care, far down the neck, and over the collar of the doublet, while a single ringlet, longer and more assiduously cherished than the rest, seemed to indicate that the wearer was not of one mind with the pamphlet, then recently published by

the notorious master Prynne, on the "Unloveli

ness of Lovelocks."

The dress of this cavalier, a loose velvet jerkin of that peculiar shade which, from being the favourite colour of the greatest painter of his day, has been dignified with the immortal title of Vandyke, was slashed and broidered with black lace and satin; tight breeches of buff leather guarded with tawny silk, high boots, and massive spurs, completed his attire; all save a broad-leafed hat of dark gray beaver, with one black ostrich feather drooping, from the clasp which held it, over the left eyebrow. His military cloak of sable cloth and velvet was buckled to the croup of his war-saddle, while from beneath the housings of the bow peered out the heavy pistols, which had not long before supplanted the lance, as the peculiar weapon of the horseman. A long rapier, with its steel scabbard and basket-hilt of silver delicately carved,

hung from a shoulder-scarf of the same colour with his doublet, matched by a poniard of yet more costly fabric in his cordovan leather girdle.

When it is added, that the mare, which he had styled Brown Bess, was an animal that might be pronounced unrivalled, for the rare union she displayed of strength and beauty, of English bone and high Arabian blood-the latter manifested in the clean limb, full eye, and coat glancing like polished copper to the sunlight-nought will be wanting to the picture the traveller who was now journeying right onward, undismayed, if not incredulous, of all that he had heard, across the bleak and barren hills which skirt the southern verge of Cambridgeshire.

of

The season was that, usually the most delicious of the English year-the bright and golden days of early autumn, when the promises are fulfilled in the of spring and summer

course.

rustling harvest-field, and the rich orchard, and before the thoughts of change, decay, and death, are forced upon the mind by the sere leaf and withered herbage. The day had been mild and calm, and though evening was far advanced, the sun was still shooting his slant rays over the rounded summits and grassy slopes of the low hills, through which the ancient Roman way holds its undeviating Ere long, however, the clouds, of which the landlord had spoken as gathering so darkly to the westward, though at that time visible only in a narrow streak along the edge of the horizon, began to rise in towering masses, until the light of the declining day-god was first changed to a dark and lurid crimson, and then wholly intercepted. After a while the wind, which had been slight and southerly, veered round, and blew in fitful squalls, now whirling the dust and stubble high into the air, and

again subsiding into a stillness that, from the contrast around, seemed unnatural. Such was the aspect of the night when the sun set, and the little light which had hitherto struggled through intervals of the increasing storm-cloud waned rapidly to almost utter darkness.

To render the traveller's position yet less enviable, he had already passed the open country, and was now involved in the mazes of scattered woodland, which in the seventeenth century overspread so large a portion of that country. The way, too, which had thus far been firm and in good order, now running between deep hollow banks, resembled rather a water-course deserted by its torrent, than a public thoroughfare; so that his progress was both slow and painful, until he reached the banks of the Cam; at that place, as throughout much of its course, a strong and turbid stream wheeling along in sullen eddies, between shores of soft black loam. Here