mentioned in my autobiography. A new system had been introduced into
his business by his assistant, which, when left to his own unaided
resources, he failed to carry out. His affairs became involved; a
commercial crisis occurred, which he was wholly unable to meet; and
he was made a bankrupt, having first dishonestly secured to himself a
subsistence for life, out of the wreck of his property. I accidentally
heard of him, a few years since, as maintaining among the English
residents of the town he then inhabited, the character of a man who had
undeservedly suffered from severe family misfortunes, and who bore his
afflictions with the most exemplary piety and resignation.

To those once connected with him, who are now no more, I need not and
cannot refer again. That part of the dreary Past with which they are
associated, is the part which I still shrink in terror from thinking on.
There are two names which my lips have not uttered for years; which,
in this life, I shall never pronounce again. The night of Death is over
them: a night to look away from for evermore.

To look away from--but, towards what object? The Future? That way, I see
but dimly even yet. It is on the Present that my thoughts are fixed, in
the contentment which desires no change.

For the last five months I have lived here with Clara--here, on the
little estate which was once her mother's, which is now hers. Long
before my father's death we often talked, in the great country house, of
future days which we might pass together, as we pass them now, in this
place. Though we may often leave it for a time, we shall always look
back to Lanreath Cottage as to our home. The years of retirement which
I spent at the Hall, after my recovery, have not awakened in me a single
longing to return to the busy world. Ralph--now the head of our family;
now aroused by his new duties to a sense of his new position--Ralph,
already emancipated from many of the habits which once enthralled and
degraded him, has written, bidding me employ to the utmost the resources
which his position enables him to offer me, if I decide on entering into
public life. But I have no such purpose; I am still resolved to live on
in obscurity, in retirement, in peace. I have suffered too much; I have
been wounded too sadly, to range myself with the heroes of Ambition, and
fight my way upward from the ranks. The glory and the glitter which I
once longed to look on as my own, would dazzle and destroy