them, which shows that they have not yielded to the exclusiveness of feeling apt to be engendered by brooding over private afflictions. Many people wondered at their choosing to return to this neighbourhood, but I thought I could perfectly understand the feeling which prompted it. So long as Mr. Cressingham Stanley had remained at Helmsley I can believe they would not willingly have done so; but that gentleman, after a few months' residence at the Hall, during which he must have perceived himself to be exceedingly unpopular in the neighbourhood, pronounced the place dull and detestable, and removed his family once more to his wife's property in -—shire, which I lately heard of their having left for the continent. He tried to let the Hall, but failed to find a tenant, and now he is cutting down timber so far as permitted by the entail which fortunately protects all within a wide circuit of the mansion-and allowing everything to go to ruin. Thus poor Jane and Marion have at all times access to the grounds and the house, and their walks thither generally end, they tell me, in the cottage near the village, to which their good old friend, Mrs. Peters, has retired to spend the remainder of her days; with her to indulge in the melancholy luxury of talking and weeping over the past. They fixed their residence in the town of they say, instead of the country, partly because there was no country residence to be had within so easy a distance of the Hall, but still more for the sake of living close by the Cathedral. It is impossible—both sisters have often told me to express the soothing, consoling, sanctifying influence they have derived from the service there; the relief it has repeatedly afforded them from the pressure of bitter thoughts, or the degree to which it seems to temper the fitful fever of this earthly life with the peace and repose of the heavenly. I have often wished that those who entertain a mistrust of the feelings excited by our sublime church music could hear the testimony in its favour borne by those whose own experience certainly has qualified them to speak upon the subject. I think they would be compelled to admit that there may be a class of feelings not in themselves entirely devotional, but which in their intensity and their purity, above all, in their elevation above the littleness of earthly things, are calculated to lead the soul from earth towards heaven; and that whatever has a tendency to excite and cherish such feelings cannot in itself be otherwise than good. A heart so crushed beneath a load of sorrow that the voice of speech, though uttered by the best and wisest of men, would fall on the ear in vain, may yet be reached by the power of musictouched, softened, and won to thoughts of calmness and submission. Surely it is not well to seek to dispense with so potent an auxiliary." Thus closed the narrative of my friend; and after hearing it, it may be conceived with what added feelings of interest I revisited Helmsley Hall, which I did again more than once in her company; while those who possess a natural bent towards the dreaming and the visionary will understand how it was that the seat beneath the acacia, and the room in which Mr. Stanley had died, should have been the two spots which I most particularly loved to haunt, connected as they were in my mind with one of those mysteries which in this world do sometimes occur to baffle all the matter-of-fact explanations of the most severely rational philosophers, and whose real explanation we shall never come at till we reach that place where all the mysteries that now encompass our being shall be made plain. During the remainder of my stay at |