diality among
them. My father's tenderness was unabated by this change, and those
humiliations to which I had before been exposed were now no more; and
every tie was strengthened, at the end of a year, by the feelings of a
_mother_. I had need, indeed, to know a season of happiness, that I
might be fitted to endure the sad reverses that succeeded. One after the
other my disasters came, each one more heavy than the last, and in such
swift succession that they hardly left me time to breathe.

"I had scarcely left my chamber, I had scarcely recovered my usual
health, and was able to press with true fervour the new and precious
gift to my bosom, when melancholy tidings came. I was in the country, at
the seat of my father-in-law, when the messenger arrived.

"A shocking tale it was! and told abruptly, with every unpitying
aggravation. I hinted to you once my father's death. The _kind_ of
death--oh! my friend! It was horrible. He was then a placid, venerable
old man; though many symptoms of disquiet had long before been
discovered by my mother's watchful tenderness. Yet none could suspect
him capable of such a deed; for none, so carefully had he conducted his
affairs, suspected the havoc that mischance had made of his property.

"I, that had so much reason to love my father,--I will leave you to
imagine how I was affected by a catastrophe so dreadful, so
unlooked-for. Much less could I suspect the cause of his despair; yet he
had foreseen his ruin before my marriage; had resolved to defer it, for
his daughter's and his wife's sake, as long as possible, but had still
determined not to survive the day that should reduce him to indigence.
The desperate act was thus preconcerted--thus deliberate.

"The true state of his affairs was laid open by his death. The failure
of great mercantile houses at Frankfort and Liege was the cause of his
disasters.

"Thus were my prospects shut in. That wealth which, no doubt, furnished
the chief inducement with my husband's family to concur in his choice,
was now suddenly exchanged for poverty.

"Bred up, as I had been, in pomp and luxury; conscious that my wealth
was my chief security from the contempt of the proud and bigoted, and my
chief title to the station to which I had been raised, and which I the
more delighted in because it enabled me to confer so great obligations
on my husband,--what reverse could be harder than this, and how much
bitterness was added by it to the grief occasion