ce of the nation.
History contains few stories more sorrowful than the death of this
child. To the limited vision of mortals, it is indeed inexplicable why
he should have been left by that God, who rules in infinite wisdom and
love, to so dreadful a fate. For the solution of this and all other
inexplicable mysteries of the divine government, we must look forward to
our immortality.

But we must return to Maria Theresa. We left her at midnight, delirious
with grief and terror, upon the pallet of her cell, her aunt having
just been torn from her embrace. Even the ravages of captivity had not
destroyed the exceeding beauty of the princess, now sixteen years of
age. The slow hours of that night of anguish lingered away, and the
morning, cheerless and companionless, dawned through the grated window
of her prison upon her woe. Thus days and nights went and came. She knew
not what had been the fate of her mother. She knew not what doom awaited
her aunt. She could have no intercourse with her brother, who she only
knew was suffering every conceivable outrage in another part of the
prison. Her food was brought to her by those who loved to show their
brutal power over the daughter of a long line of kings. Weeks and months
thus rolled on without any alleviation--without the slightest gleam of
joy or hope penetrating the midnight gloom of her cell. It is impossible
for the imagination to paint the anguish endured by this beautiful,
intellectual, affectionate, and highly-accomplished princess during
these weary months of solitude and captivity. Every indulgence was
withheld from her, and conscious existence became the most weighty woe.
Thus a year and a half lingered slowly away, while the reign of terror
was holding its high carnival in the streets of blood-deluged Paris,
and every friend of royalty, of whatever sex or age, all over the
empire, was hunted down without mercy.

When the reaction awakened by these horrors commenced in the public
mind, the rigor of her captivity was somewhat abated. The death of her
brother roused in her behalf, as the only remaining child of the wrecked
and ruined family, such a feeling of sympathy, that the Assembly
consented to regard her as a prisoner of war, and to exchange her with
the Austrian government for four French officers whom they held as
prisoners. Maria Theresa was led, pale, pensive, heart-broken, hopeless,
from her cell, and placed in the hands of the relatives of her mother.
But h