Eye of man never looked upon lovelier landscape; mind of man could not contemplate one more suggestive of all that is, or ought to be, interesting in life. Peaceful smokes ascending out of far-off chimneys; farm-houses, with their surrounding walls, standing amid the greenery of old homestead trees--now in full leaf, for it is the month of June--here and there the sharp spire of a church, or the showy façade of a gentleman's mansion--in the distant background, the dark blue mountains of Monmouthshire; among them conspicuous the Blorenge, Skerrid, and Sugar Loaf. The man who could look on such a picture, without drawing from it inspirations of pleasure, must be out of sorts with the world, if not weary of it.
And yet just such a man is now viewing it from Glyngog House, or rather the bit of shrubbery ground in front. He is seated on a rustic bench partly shattered, barely enough of it whole to give room beside him for a small japanned tray on which are tumbler, bottle and jug--the two last respectively containing brandy and water; while in the first is an admixture of both. He is smoking a meerschaum pipe, which at short intervals he removes from his mouth to give place to the drinking glass.
The personal appearance of this man is in curious correspondence with the bench on which he sits, the walls around, and the house behind. Like all these, he looks dilapidated. Not only is his apparel out of repair, but his constitution too, as shown by hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, with crows feet ramifying around them. This due not, as with the surrounding objects, to age; for he is still under forty. Nor yet any of the natural infirmities to which flesh is heir; but evidently to drink. Some reddish spots upon his nose and flecks on the forehead, with the glass held in shaking hand, proclaims this the cause. And it is.
Lewin Murdock--such is the man's name--has led a dissipated life. Not much of it in England; still less in Herefordshire; and only its earlier years in the house he now inhabits--his paternal home. Since boyhood he has been abroad, staying none can say where, and straying no one knows whither--often seen, however, at Baden, Homburg, and other "hells," punting high or low, as the luck has gone for or against him. At a later period in Paris, during the Imperial _régime_--worst hell of all. It has stripped him of everything; driven him out and home, to seek asylum at Glyngog, once a handsome property, now but a _pied à terre_, on which he may only set his foot with a mortgage around his neck. For even the little land left to it is let out to a farmer, and the rent goes not to him. He is, in fact, only a tenant on his patrimonial estate; holding but the house at that, with the ornamental grounds and an acre or two of orchard, of which he takes no care. The farmer's sheep may scale the crumbling walls, and browse the weedy enclosure at will: give Lewin Murdock his meerschaum pipe, with enough brandy and water, and he but laughs. Not that he is of a jovial disposition, not at all given to mirth; only that it takes something more than the pasturage of an old orchard to excite his thoughts, or turn them to cupidity.