mmediately set out for Cromarty;
and, curious as it may seem, found grief so companionable, that the four
hours which I spent by the way seemed hardly equal to one. I retained,
however, only a confused recollection of my journey, remembering little
more than that, when passing at midnight along the dreary Maolbuie, I
saw the moon in her wane, rising red and lightless out of the distant
sea; and that, lying, as it were, prostrate on the horizon, she reminded
me of some o'ermatched wrestler thrown helplessly on the ground.

On reaching home, I found my mother, late as the hour was, still up, and
engaged in making a dead-dress for the body. "There is a letter from the
south, with a black seal, awaiting you," she said; "I fear you have also
lost your friend William Ross." I opened the letter, and found her
surmise too well founded. It was a farewell letter, written in feeble
characters, but in no feeble spirit; and a brief postscript, added by a
comrade, intimated the death of the writer. "This," wrote the dying man,
with a hand fast forgetting its cunning, "is, to all human probability,
my last letter; but the thought gives me little trouble; for my hope of
salvation is in the blood of Jesus. Farewell, my sincerest friend!"
There is a provision through which nature sets limits to both physical
and mental suffering. A man partially stunned by a violent blow is
sometimes conscious that it is followed by other blows, rather from
seeing than from feeling them; his capacity of suffering has been
exhausted by the first; and the others that fall upon him, though they
may injure, fail to pain. And so also it is with strokes that fall on
the affections. In other circumstances, I would have grieved for the
death of my friend, but my mind was already occupied to the full by the
death of my uncle; and, though I _saw_ the new stroke, several days
elapsed ere _I could feel_ it. My friend, after half a lifetime of
decline, had sunk suddenly. A comrade who lived with him--a stout,
florid lad--had been seized by the same insidious malady as his own,
about a twelvemonth before; and, previously unacquainted with sickness,
in him the progress of the disease had been rapid, and his sufferings
were so great, that he was incapacitated for work several months ere his
death. But my poor friend, though sinking at the time, wrought for both:
he was able to prosecute his employments--which, according to Bacon,
"required rather the finger than the arm"