had been lying for
several days at one of the hotels there, very ill, but now past the
crisis of his disease, and thought by the physician to be out of
danger. The writer urged me, from my husband, to come on
immediately. In eight hours from the time I received that letter, I
was in New York. Alas! it was too late; the disease had returned
with double violence, and snapped the feeble thread of life. I never
saw my husband's living face again."

The self-possession of Mrs. Cleaveland, at this part of her
narrative, gave way. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed
violently, while the tears came trickling through her fingers.

"My dear Laura," she resumed, after the lapse of many minutes,
looking up as she spoke, with a clear eye, and a sober, but placid
countenance, "it is for your sake that I have turned my gaze
resolutely back. May the painful history I have given you make a
deep impression upon your heart; let it warn you of the sunken rock
upon which my bark foundered. Avoid carefully, religiously avoid
setting yourself in opposition to your husband; should he prove
unreasonable or arbitrary, nothing is to be gained, and every thing
lost by contention. By gentleness, by forbearance, by even suffering
wrong at times, you will be able to win him over to a better spirit:
an opposite course will as assuredly put thorns in your pillow as
you adopt it. Look at the unhappy condition of the friends you have
named; their husbands are, in their eyes, exacting, domineering
tyrants. But this need not be. Let them act truly the woman's part.
Let them not oppose, but yield, and they will find that their
present tyrants' will become their lovers. Above all, never, under
any circumstances, either jestingly or in earnest, say '_I will_,'
when you are opposed. That declaration is never made without its
robbing the wife of a portion of her husband's confidence and love;
its utterance has dimmed the fire upon many a smiling hearth-stone."

Laura could not reply; the relation of her aunt had deeply shocked
her feelings. But the words she had uttered sank into her heart; and
when her trial came--when she was tempted to set her will in
opposition to her husband's, and resolutely to contend for what she
deemed right, a thought of Mrs. Cleaveland's story would put a seal
upon her lips. It was well. The character of Henry Armour too nearly
resembled that of Mr. Cleaveland: he could illy have brooked a
wife's opposition; but her tend