other members of her family,
or one or two intimate friends, came to the house. Offers of marriage
were made to her, but were all declined. The first, last love of her
girlish days--abandoned as a hope, and crushed as a passion; living only
as a quiet grief, as a pure remembrance--still kept its watch, as
guardian and defender, over her heart. Years passed on and worked no
change in the sad uniformity of her life, until the death of her aunt
left her mistress of the house in which she had hitherto been a guest.
Then it was observed that she made fewer and fewer efforts to vary the
tenor of her existence, to forget her old remembrances for awhile in the
society of others. Such invitations as reached her from relations and
friends were more frequently declined than accepted. She was growing old
herself now; and, with each advancing year, the busy pageant of the
outer world presented less and less that could attract her eye.

So she began to surround herself, in her solitude, with the favorite
books that she had studied, with the favorite music that she had played,
in the days of her hopes and her happiness. Every thing that was
associated, however slightly, with that past period, now acquired a
character of inestimable value in her eyes, as aiding her mind to
seclude itself more and more strictly in the sanctuary of its early
recollections. Was it weakness in her to live thus; to abandon the world
and the world's interests, as one who had no hope, or part in either?
Had she earned the right, by the magnitude and resolution of her
sacrifice, thus to indulge in the sad luxury of fruitless remembrance?
Who shall say!--who shall presume to decide that cannot think with _her_
thoughts, and look back with _her_ recollections!

Thus she lived--alone, and yet not lonely; without hope, but with no
despair; separate and apart from the world around her, except when she
approached it by her charities to the poor, and her succor to the
afflicted; by her occasional interviews with the surviving members of
her family and a few old friends, when they sought her in her calm
retreat; and by the little presents which she constantly sent to
brothers' and sisters' children, who worshipped, as their invisible good
genius, "the kind lady" whom most of them had never seen. Such was her
existence throughout the closing years of her life: such did it
continue--calm and blameless--to the last.

* * * * *

Reader,