had nothing to subsist on but the roots that my own hand had cultivated, if I had known that, wherever my name was repeated among the inhabitants of earth, I was regarded as a monster, betraying the most sacred trust, and perpetrating the most cold-hearted villainy, I should then have known the worst. There is a principle in human nature, by which the sufferer in almost all cases reconciles himself to what is inevitable, is complete, and cannot be reversed. He looks round, and considers rather what he has left, than what he has lost. He gathers up the fragments of the wreck; he arranges them along the walls of his cell; he says to himself, This is my dowry and inheritance for the remainder of my existence; he desperately adapts himself to the hardness of his fortune, and considers how he shall make the best of it.

But the man who, every morning that he wakes, wakes with a dull, aching pain, with a mighty depression of spirits, with an indescrib

able load weighing at his heart, and who after a few moments recollects what all this means, and what he has to expect, he is truly a wretch. Expectation, fearful expectation, is to him the vulture of Prometheus, preying on his liver, which still grows again, as fast as it is devoured. His wound is ever fresh; no time cures it; no balm has the virtue to skin it over. I knew not on what day the final mischief would arrive; but I had an assured conviction that arrive it must.

Yet my days and my hours were not all of sorrow. I had a wife, the most exemplary of her sex; I had children that improved every day in towardliness and beauty. I looked upon them, and was joyful: I looked a second time, and my agonies grew a thousand times the fiercer, because I had such relations and holds on my affection. Fool that I was! Why had I not had the courage to take the hard lot which I had brought upon myself, alone, and

without involving others in the miseries that awaited me? Villain and poltroon that I was! What right had I to embark all these innocents among the storms that were engendered by my crime?

My wife had borne me a son and a daughter, before the time in which I received Cloudesley's letter; she brought me two more children, one of either sex, afterwards. They were as beautiful as the day, and not less affectionate and docile than they were beautiful. You have seen the youngest. What was there wanting, to make me the happiest of men? Yet I was miserable. I have lost the whole of this family, one by one, except this last.

My children were exactly similar in constitution the one to the other, cast, as I may say, in one mould. They came into the world with every promise of health, of vigour, and of living to the farthest period of human existence. They knew no sickness, were for ever joyous and

happy from morning till night. Their limbs were formed in the most exquisite proportion, and their cheeks were marked with the roses of health. Intelligence and sweetness rivalled each other in their infant countenances. They grew from month to month, and from year to year, "in stature," and, as it should seem, "in favour with God and man." Every added season appeared to be productive of a new tendril, twining itself round the heart of their father and mother. Their first essays to walk, to hurry with doubtful, eager steps from the arms of parent to parent sitting at a little distance from each other, their unassured lispings of articulate sound, and attempts to give to each of us an appropriate, endearing name, were delicious beyond the power of words to describe. Their learning to read, and all the little lessons we excited them to commit to memory and repeat, were an inexhaustible source of entertainment to Their gambols on the turf, their races after

us.

one another, their wrestling in sport, their struggles for mastery, their tumbling and rising, and the cheerful laughter that crowed in their little throats, and ran over from their eyes, we could sit for hours to observe. To these wild and lawless amusements, the jargon of the babe, succeeded, in due course of years, the song and the dance, the musical instrument and the pencil. In all they gave us satisfaction.

We were the most gratified of parents, till my eldest boy had nearly completed the eleventh year of his age. We then gradually perceived an alteration in his health. His cheeks burned with a low fever. His nights were marked with profuse perspiration. His flesh daily wasted away. His appetite decayed. He grew languid and averse to activity and exertion. Our anxiety respecting him became extreme, and we consulted a multitude of physicians. They knew not how to account for his disease, and called it atrophy. We tried change of air, and