ith a satisfaction that was proportionately
heightened by their sufferings.

About this period they expected a letter from their daughter; and on the
morning in question their father had dispatched one of his boys to the
post-office, with a hope of receiving it. The male portion of the family
were the younger, with the exception of the eldest son, who was their
third child. Their position was as follows: the old man sat at the end
of a plain table, with his bible open before him--for they had just
concluded prayer: his wife, a younger-looking woman, and faded more
by affliction than by age, sat beside him, holding on her breast their
third daughter--she who had been once the star of their hearth, and who
reclined there in mute sorrow, her pale cheek and wasted hands giving
those fatal indications of consumption in its last stage, which so
severely tries the heart of parent or relative to witness. The other two
girls sat opposite, one of them in tears, turning her heart-broken
look now upon the countenance of her father and again upon that of her
gentle, but almost dying sister, whilst her companion endeavored to
soothe her little brother, who was crying for food; for the simple fact
was, that they had not yet breakfasted, nor were the means of providing
a breakfast under their roof. Their sole hope for that, as well as for
more enlarged relief, depended upon the letter which they expected from
their eldest daughter.

It is scarcely necessary to say that they all looked pale, sickly, and
emaciated with suffering, and want of' the comfortable necessaries of
life. Their dress was decent, of course, but such as they never expected
to have been forced to wear so long. The crying boy was barefooted,
and the young creature who endeavored to console him had thin and worn
slippers on her tender feet, and her snowy skin was in more than one
place visible through the rents of her frock. The old man looked
at them, from time to time; and there might have been observed,
notwithstanding the sweetness and placidity of his smile, a secret
expression of inward agony--the physical and natural feelings of the
parent and the man mingling, or rather struggling, with the great
principle of dependence on God, without which he must at once have sunk
down prostrate and hopeless.

"When," said the boy, "will Edward come from the post-office? Is there
nothing at all in the house, mamma, that I could eat?"

"Hush! Frank," said his sister; "whe