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

bathing in all its forms. Nothing was of the smallest service to him. The malady proceeded with gigantic strides; and in less than two months from the first attack, he was a corpse. It was almost impossible to conceive so perfect a skeleton, as he was when his body was stretched on the bier. At first he appeared to suffer much from the inroads and tediousness of the disease, the lengthened days and sleepless nights. But he never murmured, and was always anxious to relieve the uneasiness of his parents. And, when he died, it was without a struggle. It was in a manner impossible to discern when the final change took place. He expired at a beautiful watering-place in the south of Ireland; and we deposited his remains in a vault, appertaining to the barons of Alton in our own parish.

It is scarcely in words to express the grief that Selina and myself felt for his loss. He was our first-born, the heir to all my titles and

estates, and the heir in reversion to the rank and property of the elder branch of my family in England. Such he would infallibly have proved if he had lived, unless a certain fatal reverse had occurred, of the possibility of which Selina had no suspicion, and which I could scarcely be said seriously to have expected. He was two years older than our next child, a daughter; and our hearts were bound up in the life of the boy.

But, beside the direct sorrow with which this event afflicted us, it altered all our views and feelings on the point of domestic comfort. Life and death are conceptions of a peculiar sort; we habitually combine the idea of death with that of an age in a certain degree advanced; this is what we call the course of nature; we know that every man's time must come, and that all must die. But, when we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts.