grave. Poor creature, such a spectre! When her husband used to carry
her, for the sake of a little temporary relief, from chair to couch, and
from her couch back again to her bed, twenty times in a day, he hardly
could help weeping, with all his consideration, to feel her frame as
light as a bundle of leaves. The medical man said, that in all his
practice he never had known soul and body keep together in such utter
attenuation. But her soul was as clear as ever while racking pain was in
her fleshless bones. Even he, her loving husband, was relieved from woe
when she expired; for no sadness, no sorrow, could be equal to the
misery of groans from one so patient and so resigned. Perhaps
consumption is infectious--so, at least, it seemed here; for first one
child began to droop, and then another--the elder ones first; and,
within the two following years, there were almost as many funerals from
this one house as from all the others in the parish. Yes--they all
died--of the whole family not one was spared. Two, indeed, were thought
to have pined away in a sort of fearful foreboding--and a fever took off
a third--but four certainly died of the same hereditary complaint with
the mother; and now not a voice was heard in the house. He did not
desert the Broom; and the farm-work was still carried on, nobody could
tell how. The servants, to be sure, knew their duty, and often performed
it without orders. Sometimes the master put his hand to the plough, but
oftener he led the life of a shepherd, and was by himself among the
hills. He never smiled--and at every meal he still sat like a man about
to be led out to die. But what will not retire away--recede--disappear
from the vision of the souls of us mortals! Tenacious as we are of our
griefs, even more than of our joys, both elude our grasp. We gaze after
them with longing or self-upbraiding aspirations for their return; but
they are shadows, and like shadows vanish. Then human duties, lowly
though they may be, have their sanative and salutary influence on our
whole frame of being. Without their performance conscience cannot be
still; with it, conscience brings peace in extremity of evil. Then
occupation kills grief, and industry abates passion. No balm for sorrow
like the sweat of the brow poured into the furrows of the earth, in the
open air, and beneath the sunshine of heaven. These truths were felt by
the childless widower, long before they were understood by him; and when
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