with deceiving smiles, and to speak composure and consolation, while her heart was breaking.

The fate of our remaining daughter was no

sooner decided and complete, than the dreadful and destructive effects of all that had passed became visible in Selina. The heart of her heart was gone. She said, she was fully aware that she had at least one remaining duty to perform on earth, attendance on the days, and an endeavour to sustain the failing strength, and mitigate the last struggles and suffering, of our surviving son. He was beyond doubt destined to follow the others, and to die as they had died. She frankly confessed, that the affections of a wife and a mother in the course of nature grew weaker to her husband, and fixed with the intensest interest upon her children. She in pathetic and ingenuous, heartfelt strains intreated me to forgive this. She was truly grieved, she said, that she should be disabled

from performing to the end the duties of a mo

ther, from receiving the last breath of her now

only child.

But there was no chance that this could be the case. My youngest son flourished in reckless infancy. Sometimes-but seldom-he recollected that he had had sisters and a brother; often he gazed with an affectionate and wistful eye upon the drooping form of his mother. But the spring of youth was upon him. He was heart-whole, and perfect in the healthful hue and circulations of a beginning existence. No dart of disease had ever yet grazed the smooth and wholesome surface of his frame. While on the other hand the life of his mother was rapidly undermined by mournful recollections of the past, and fearful anticipation of the fu

ture.

She could neither eat nor sleep. She was surrounded to her own perceptions by a heavy and dismal atmosphere, such as we may fancy hanging over a city, already in the arms of pes

tilence, and the inhabitants of which are dying by fifties and hundreds in an hour. The sun brought no light to her; and the moon and the stars refused their office of communicating serenity to her soul, and revealing the images of other systems and inhabited worlds.

Before she was yet too weak for the task, she caused me to be called to her bedside, that she might impart to me her latest wishes. She said, My beloved Richard, we have yet one child left. Be tender of him; watch over him; be to him father and mother in one. Perhaps you may be more fortunate in your care of him than I could be. You are a man. You have sinews and a composure fit for the office. You can look on these things, and not be shaken. You have borne the bereavement of all that we had, while I could not. To your steady mind then, and to your masculine fortitude, I bequeath the care of our last and only hope. May your administration of this our revenue and estate be more successful than mine has been.

God bless my husband! and, God bless my child!

Thus did Selina in these last solemn moments misread my character. I shed no tears: but no tongue can tell what I suffered. I preserved a plausible and a manlike exterior. But it was

not possible that my wife should suffer the thousandth part of the agonies that I did. She saw the course of events: but I only possessed the key that explained and opened the whole. To her it was only an unheard of oppression of adverse incidents but I saw in it the hand of God. It was justice, that he who had robbed and maltreated his brother's orphan, should himself be made childless, that he who had stolen the inheritance of his brother, should be denied the fruit of his loins to inherit after him. All these innocents, my wife and her offspring, perished from the face of the earth; but I was the guilty They died from me one by one; and I

cause.

live to tell the story.

When my whole family had perished, and I

It

with my youngest son was left alone, it is not in words to express the anguish that overwhelmed me. I had found my misery, my solitary state, and the curse that followed me, insupportable; and I married. I sought, by surrounding myself with all the dearest objects of human affection, to obtain relief from the remorse and self-abhorrence, which in my sequestered state for ever preyed on my vitals. was not likely that, having felt the consolations of a husband and a father, and been again deprived of them, I should suffer in patience the evils from which they had relieved me. I saw the hand of the governor of the universe in all. He was my enemy! Where would he stop in the just retribution inflicted for my crime? What sort of a monument of divine vengeance was I to become? I saw all the miseries that had hitherto overtaken me. But it was beyond the penetration of my prophetic spirit to discern what was to come.