I have heard a story of a girl who was captive to some Eastern prince, and wore upon her ancles a light golden ring. She learned to love her master devotedly, and was as happy as she could be in his love. Adored, adorned, and cherished, she sat beside him one day in all the pomp of Eastern state, when suddenly her eye fell upon the golden ring round her ancle, which custom had rendered so light that she had forgotten it altogether. The tears instantly rose in her eyes as she looked upon it, and her lover divining all at once, asked, with a look of reproach, "Would you be free?" She cast herself upon his bosom and answered, "Never!"
Thus, often the links that bind us to early scenes and places, in which we have passed happy or unhappy hours, are unobserved and forgotten, till some casual circumstance turns our eyes thitherward. But if any one should ask us whether we would sever that chain, there is scarcely one fine mind that would not also answer, Never! The passing of our days may be painful, the early years may be checkered with grief and care, unkindness and frowns may wither the smiles of boyhood, and tears bedew the path of youth; yet, nevertheless, when we stand and look back, in later life, letting Memory hover over the past, prepared to light where she will, there is no period in all the space laid out before her over which her wings flutter so joyfully, or on which she would so much wish to pause, as the times of our youth. The evils of other days are forgotten; the scenes in which those days passed are remembered, detached from the sorrows that checkered them, and the bright misty light of life's first sunrise still gilds the whole with a glory not its own. It is not alone, however, after long years have passed away, and crushed out the gall from sorrows endured, that fine and enchanting feelings are awakened by the scenes in which our early days have gone by, and that the thrill of association is felt in all its joyfulness, acting as an antidote to the poisonous sorrows which often mingle with our cup.
It was so, at least, with Charles Tyrrell as he returned towards the home of his fathers. The sun rose upon his journey when he was about twenty miles from home, but still in scenes of which every rood was familiar to him; and while the first red and blushing hues upon the eastern sky were changing into the bright and golden splendour that surrounds the half-risen sun, the road wound out upon the side of a hill, showing him a wide extent of country to the right, scattered with many a mound and many a tumulus, each, in general, planted with a small clump of dark fir-trees, which waved above the conical hillocks like plumes from the casques of the warriors who now slept beneath.