red now. She had taken the illness on the same day with Esmond--she
and her brother were both dead of the small-pox, and buried under the
Castlewood yew-trees. There was no bright face looking now from the
garden, or to cheer the old smith at his lonely fireside. Esmond would
have liked to have kissed her in her shroud (like the lass in Mr. Prior's
pretty poem), but she rested many foot below the ground, when Esmond after
his malady first trod on it.

Doctor Tusher brought the news of this calamity, about which Harry Esmond
longed to ask, but did not like. He said almost the whole village had been
stricken with the pestilence; seventeen persons were dead of it, among
them mentioning the names of poor Nancy and her little brother. He did not
fail to say how thankful we survivors ought to be. It being this man's
business to flatter and make sermons, it must be owned he was most
industrious in it, and was doing the one or the other all day.

And so Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single
tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the
rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs
deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that
surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an
ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard afterwards. He made a long
face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a
funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and
are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last
day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty
lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good
he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of
it. 'Tis an error, surely, to talk of the simplicity of youth. I think no
persons are more hypocritical, and have a more affected behaviour to one
another, than the young. They deceive themselves and each other with
artifices that do not impose upon men of the world; and so we got to
understand truth better, and grow simpler as we grow older.

When my lady heard of the fate which had befallen poor Nancy, she said
nothing so long as Tusher was by, but when he was gone, she took Harry
Esmond's hand and said--

"Harry, I beg your pardon for those cruel words I used on the night you
were taken ill. I am shocked at the fate of the poor creature, and a