Till extinct life’s wasting ember.
EDITH MORTON.
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BY MISS S. A. STUART.
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CHAPTER I.
Have you ever been, dear reader, in that sweet little village of A——, in Virginia? Well, if you have not, you certainly have yet to see, the most pleasant little Eden of this earth; where they have the purest air, the most beautiful sunsets, and the bluest skies imaginable—Italy not excepted—so I think. There lived my heroine; and such a heroine, at the time I have chosen to introduce her to you.
It was close upon sundown, on a lovely spring day, when a strikingly handsome, distingué looking young man, alighted from his buggy, at the residence of Mrs. Morton, in the above mentioned village. Charles Lennard—the young man spoken of—had been received as a boarder, for a few months, into Mrs. Morton’s quiet family, as his health was too delicate to allow him to trust to the precarious and uncertain kindness shown by the landladies, in general, of thriving village inns. Some moneyed affair had called him to A., and here he had arrived on this lovely spring evening; and the skies wore their rosiest blush to greet his coming.
“By all that’s pretty! ’tis a little Paradise,” was his muttered notice, as he passed through the flower-garden, whose clinging vines, creeping o’er the lattice supports, veiled the little bird-nest of white that peeped out amid the rich green foliage, varied in color by a thousand tinted flowers. “I hope Mrs. Morton has given me a room overlooking the garden; ’twill be delightful to read here whilst these perfumes are floating around one.”