ghts o'
past sorrows that are owre strong to be borne, I try to look forward
to the future; but, alas! I see naething there but the pain o' livin
for a number o' comfortless years o' auld age, draggin after me, a
memory clogged wi' past ills, and naething afore me but a jail, and
want, and lingerin death."

"These are false views of life," said I--"overstrained and morbid. I
must teach you to think better. You have a daughter who will comfort
you, and whom you are bound to support and protect."

"True, true," he cried; "I hae a dochter, and a better never
sacrificed her ain thochts and feelins to the comforts o' a faither.
The idea o' leavin her, young, faitherless, poor, and full o' sorrow,
in the midst o' a bad world, has before this" (lowering his voice)
"brought down that rebellious hand from this throat. But, alas for the
inconsistency and mutability o' man's fancies!--dearly as I love that
creature, and she is now my only comfort, my very affection for her
sometimes sinks me deeper into that sorrow which produces the dreadfu
purpose o' takin awa my ain life; for I think--oh! how weak is man's
proud reason, when the heart is broken wi' grief!--that an auld parent
under the ban o' poverty is a burden to a child. His death (so in
these unhappy moments do I think) relieves the unhappy bairn o' twa
evils--that o' toilin maybe in vain to support him, and that o'
witnessin age, decrepitude, pain, misery, and want, wringin frae his
shrivelled and diseased body groans o' agony, strikin the heart o' his
child wi' mair pain than would be caused by the knell o' his death."

He now sank his face in the bedclothes, which he grasped with a
spasmodic hand, and groaned so deep and loud that the sounds might
have reached the passage. I again heard a noise from that quarter, as
if of stifled sighs and hysterical sobs. I was placed between the
groans of a father bent against his own judgment on self-destruction,
and the terrors and griefs of a daughter listening to the horrible
recital of her parent's designs against his life. The loneliness of
the house, and the solitude of the unhappy pair--with no one to aid
the young woman, in the event of any appalling extremity to which the
unnatural purpose of her father might drive him--struck me forcibly. I
had no recollection of ever experiencing a scene of grief so peculiar,
with such fearful and uncertain issues, so irremediable and
heart-stirring. The groans of the one and the sobs of