the pestilential fever, which prevails in that
country six months of the year, and which will forever baffle the attempts
of the European nations to form establishments on that fatal soil. His
effects were seized upon by the rapacity of strangers; and his wife, who
was pregnant, found herself a widow in a country where she had neither
credit nor recommendation, and no earthly possession, or rather support,
save one negro woman. Too delicate to solicit protection or relief from any
other man after the death of him whom alone she loved, misfortune armed her
with courage, and she resolved to cultivate with her slave a little spot of
ground, and procure for herself the means of subsistence. In an island
almost a desert, and where the ground was left to the choice of the
settler, she avoided those spots which were most fertile and most
favourable to commerce; and seeking some nook of the mountain, some secret
asylum, where she might live solitary and unknown, she bent her way from
the town towards those rocks, where she wished to shelter herself as in a
nest. All suffering creatures, from a sort of common instinct, fly for
refuge amidst their pains to haunts the most wild and desolate; as if rocks
could form a rampart against misfortune; as if the calm of nature could
hush the tumults of the soul. That Providence, which lends its support when
we ask but the supply of our necessary wants, had a blessing in reserve for
Madame de la Tour, which neither riches nor greatness can purchase; this
blessing was a friend.

"The spot to which Madame de la Tour fled had already been inhabited a year
by a young woman of a lively, good natured, and affectionate disposition.
Margaret (for that was her name) was born in Britany, of a family of
peasants, by whom she was cherished and beloved, and with whom she might
have passed life in simple rustic happiness, if, misled by the weakness of
a tender heart, she had not listened to the passion of a gentleman in the
neighbourhood, who promised her marriage. He soon abandoned her, and adding
inhumanity to seduction, refused to ensure a provision for the child of
which she was pregnant. Margaret then determined to leave for ever her
native village, and go, where her fault might be concealed, to some colony
distant from that country where she had lost the only portion of a poor
peasant girl--her reputation. With some borrowed money she purchased an old
negro slave, with whom she cultivated a little sp