on,
escaped unnoticed. I immediately made for the shore; and after many
hair-breadth escapes from my old associates, I volunteered on board one
of the cruisers on the Jamaica station. At length she returned home, the
crew were paid off, and I determined to seek you out. On inquiring at
the office of the owners of the Albion, in Liverpool, they told me that
the late chief mate had settled, some years before, in the neighbourhood
of Rothesay, in the Isle of Bute, and was still alive. Thank heaven! I
have found you at last! I should like to live, Charles, to prove to you
my sorrow and repentance for the past; but, as heaven has willed it
otherwise, the blessed assurance of your forgiveness will lighten death
of half its terrors."

The poor fellow breathed his last a few days afterwards. Douglas mourned
long and deeply for his brother's death; but after time had soothed his
grief, he became quite an altered man. His mind and spirits recovered
their elasticity, after the load which had so long weighed them down
was removed. He did not resume his own name; but lived many years
afterwards, contented and happy, in the humble station of a fisherman;
and it was not till after his death that his old companions discovered
how justly the name of "Gentleman Douglas" had been applied to him. His
tombstone bore the simple inscription, "Charles Douglas Ponsonby,
eldest son of the late Reverend T. Ponsonby."

I often wander, in the calm summer evenings, to the quiet churchyard,
and return a sadder, but, I hope, a better man, after meditating upon
the troublous and adventurous life, and peaceful and Christian death of
the ROTHESAY FISHERMAN.

LEAVES
FROM
THE DIARY OF AN AGED SPINSTER.

The poet of THE ELEGY _par excellence_, hath written two lines, which
run thus--

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Now, I never can think of these lines but they remind me of the tender,
delicate, living, breathing, and neglected flowers that bud, blossom,
shed their leaves, and die, in cold unsunned obscurity--flowers that
were formed to shed their fragrance around a man's heart, and to charm
his eye--but which, though wandering melancholy and alone in the
wilderness where they grow, he passeth by with neglect, making a
companion of his loneliness. But, to drop all metaphor--where will you
find a flower more interesting than a spinster of threescore and ten, of
sixty, of fi