[CHAPTER IV.]
The bridegroom may forget the bride
Was made his wedded wife yestreen.
Burns.
It was on a serene autumnal morning succeeding the day of Lady Adelaide's nuptials, the sun had brilliantly arisen, dispelling the misty gloom and dews of night, and shed around his broad refracted rays; unruffled by a passing cloud, a clear and lofty sky spread forth its mighty canopy of mild aërial blue; the twittering swallows hovered around, and circled in mid-air, while clustering, they chattered their parting lullaby. The solitary redbreast too joined in nature's chorus, and thrilled forth his matin song. Every mountain lake shone forth a glassy mirror, and the waves of the mighty Atlantic hushed to repose, slumbered amid their coral caves; what time the minister of the gospel of peace, the Reverend Doctor M'Kenzie, returned to the castle of his noble and generous patron, after a long protracted absence of many years.
His return had been provokingly delayed by long continued ill health, and besides by various vexatious detainers, such as bad roads, bad drivers, the cumbersome, ill-constructed vehicles of those days, and having encountered various disastrous chances of many "moving accidents" by sea and land, which had all concurred with direful combination to retard his journey, and prevent his being present upon the auspicious day when the lovely heiress of the noble duke was to bestow her hand in marriage.
His Reverence received a kind and hearty welcome from the duke and duchess, and all the inmates of the castle were rejoiced to behold his return, and to find that his health was quite re-established, so as to have permitted him to undertake such a long and fatiguing journey. His health and spirits were indeed much recruited through the beneficial effects of the waters of Pyrmont, which, like those of fabled Lethe, seemed to cause a total oblivion of all the perils inflicted amid the deep, and the dangers and difficulties sustained upon land.