er could look with certainty, was
her small annuity of L25 a-year; while one only of the family (the
eldest boy, who had been educated as a surgeon, and had got an
appointment in the East India Company's service) could do ought to eke
out the means of life for the family. In the depth of her affliction,
she would say, with pious confidence, in the language of scripture, "I
have never seen the righteous man forsaken, or his seed begging their
bread."

But, leaving these painful retrospects, it may not be inappropriate to
note briefly the career of the earl of Bellersdale, whom I had occasion
to advert to in the earlier part of this story. He survived my father
many years, and spent his life devoid of domestic happiness or public
respect, in the accumulation of wealth and the pursuits of sordid
ambition. He lived detested and despised of mankind; and, dying
unlamented by any one human being, he destined the vast treasures which
he had amassed, to constant accumulation, not to be enjoyed fully by his
heirs, but for the creation of a princedom of indefinite extent and
wealth. But the honours of the Bellersdale family were speedily
tarnished. A spendthrift successor squandered all the revenues which he
could touch; and the last time I visited that part of the country, the
splendid mansion of Bellersdale Castle was stripped of all its movables;
the collections of many years of aristocratic pride--the pictures, the
statues, the very board destined for baronial hospitality--were all
brought to the hammer for payment of a tailor's bill for gewgaws to
grace a court pageant; and the nominal inheritor of the wide domains and
honours of his lordship's house, is an obscure and useless, though
good-natured dependent upon Hebrew usurers and Gentile pettifoggers--a
mere cumberer of the ground--a sycophant of the vulgar!

I need not point the moral of my tale.

THE SEERS' CAVE.

"The desert gave him visions wild--
The midnight wind came wild and dread,
Swell'd with the voices of the dead;
Far on the future battle-heath
His eye beheld the ranks of death:
Thus the lone seer, from mankind hurl'd,
Shap'd forth a disembodied world."
SCOTT.

In a certain wild and romantic glen in the Highlands of Scotland, there
is a cave opening beneath the brow of a huge overhanging cliff, and half
concealed by wreathed roots and wild festoons of brier and woodbine.
Sev