dren.

"JOHN STERLING."

A day or two after this, "on Good Friday, 1843," his Wife got happily
through her confinement, bringing him, he writes, "a stout little girl,
who and the Mother are doing as well as possible." The little girl still
lives and does well; but for the Mother there was another lot. Till the
Monday following she too did altogether well, he affectionately watching
her; but in the course of that day, some change for the worse was
noticed, though nothing to alarm either the doctors or him; he watched
by her bedside all night, still without alarm; but sent again in the
morning, Tuesday morning, for the doctors,--Who did not seem able
to make much of the symptoms. She appeared weak and low, but made no
particular complaint. The London post meanwhile was announced; Sterling
went into another room to learn what tidings of his Mother it brought
him. Returning speedily with a face which in vain strove to be calm,
his Wife asked, How at Knightsbridge? "My Mother is dead," answered
Sterling; "died on Sunday: She is gone." "Poor old man!" murmured the
other, thinking of old Edward Sterling now left alone in the world; and
these were her own last words: in two hours more she too was dead. In
two hours Mother and Wife were suddenly both snatched away from him.

"It came with awful suddenness!" writes he to his Clifton friend. "Still
for a short time I had my Susan: but I soon saw that the medical
men were in terror; and almost within half an hour of that fatal
Knightsbridge news, I began to suspect our own pressing danger. I
received her last breath upon my lips. Her mind was much sunk, and
her perceptions slow; but a few minutes before the last, she must have
caught the idea of dissolution; and signed that I should kiss her. She
faltered painfully, 'Yes! yes!'--returned with fervency the pressure of
my lips; and in a few moments her eyes began to fix, her pulse to cease.
She too is gone from me!" It was Tuesday morning, April 18th, 1843. His
Mother had died on the Sunday before.

He had loved his excellent kind Mother, as he ought and well might: in
that good heart, in all the wanderings of his own, there had ever been
a shrine of warm pity, of mother's love and blessed soft affections
for him; and now it was closed in the Eternities forevermore. His poor
Life-partner too, his other self, who had faithfully attended him so
long in all his pilgrimings, chee