ets!--write his name with mine--it is--'

He stopped abruptly. His mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and
animation--shaken, but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed
them--suddenly rallied, and resuming somewhat of their accustomed
balance, became awakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague
revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognise as
resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive
land-owner, previously related) now appeared before him in all their
incongruity and uselessness. His countenance fell--he sighed bitterly
to himself: 'My reason begins to desert me!--my judgment, which should
guide my child--my resolution, which should uphold her, both fail me!
How should my brother, since childhood lost to me, be found by her?
Against the famine that threatens us I offer but vain words! Already
her strength declines; her face, that I loved to look on grows wan
before my eyes! God have mercy upon us!--God have mercy upon us!'

He returned feebly to his couch; his head declined on his bosom;
sometimes a low groan burst from his lips, but he spoke no more.

Deep as was the prostration under which he had now fallen, it was yet
less painful to Antonina to behold it than to listen to the incoherent
revelations which had fallen from his lips but the moment before, and
which, in her astonishment and affright, she had dreaded might be the
awful indications of the overthrow of her father's reason. As she
again placed herself by his side, she trembled to feel that her own
weariness was fast overpowering her; but she still struggled with her
rising despair--still strove to think only of capacity for endurance
and chances of relief.

The silence in the room was deep and dismal while they now sat
together. The faint breezes, at long intervals, drowsily rose and fell
as they floated through the open window; the fitful sunbeams
alternately appeared and vanished as the clouds rolled upward in airy
succession over the face of heaven. Time moved sternly in its destined
progress, and Nature varied tranquilly through its appointed limits of
change, and still no hopes, no saving projects, nothing but dark
recollections and woeful anticipations occupied Antonina's mind; when,
just as her weary head was drooping towards the ground, just as
sensation and fortitude and grief itself seemed declining into a
dreamless and deadly sleep, a last thought, void of discernible
co