aberration of her reason and was she seemed ✓ff This happier cheer of mind did not lòng “I have a great secret to tell you, she whispered, as she approached me softly and on tiptoe; Henry is dead he told me so himself; and he is buried beneath the great mi mosa, and we shall shortly meet in Heaven and be happy for ever.2oul v hesubs inda "This notion sustained her to the last, and reconciled her to her own death, of whose approach she now seemed to be sensible and even desirous. Every day, while her strength permitted, she went to the mimosa-tree, and spent the whole morning beneath its wide spreading boughs, Italking to her miniature or her parrot. I have planted some sweet basil upone the spot,' she told me, because that was the shrub with which Isabella covered the remains of her lover and some iris flowers, because they are dark blue, and so were Henry's eyes.' In a few days more her increasing debility confined her to the Hermitage, but she remained free from pain, and in a cheerful frame of mind, as she alternately sung and talked of her lover, and anticipated their early meeting in a better world. Thus serenely did her delicate spirit at length exhale itself from her body to the sky, as the odour of a rose cut off in its prime of beauty wafts itself peacefully to Heaven. Strange as the assertion may appear when advanced by so doting a father as myself, who was left by this privation in the dreariness of total solitude, I contemplated the death of my child, not only without dismay, but with a sort of gloomy satisfaction. I had long felt convinced that her recovery was hopeless, and when I remembered, that in the common course of nature I should be called away before her, leaving this sensitive and timid creature to all the lingering horrors of utter loneliness, I rejoiced that this the most agonizing of all human trials, was to rack my heart instead of hers. Having dug a grave for her beside that of her mother, I laid her in it, decked in the coronals and garlands which she had last worn, and casting down the earth upon the face of her who was still even in death the fairest flower of them all, I sate upon the spot in a sickness and desolation of soul which man cannot imagine unless he could ejaculate, as I did in bitterness of spirit, Now I am alone upon the earth ng bi "And yet I was not quite companionless Brunette, as if resolved to show me that I had one associate left, began angrily scratching up the mould that covered her mistress, and then looking piteously up in my face, sent forth a wailing cry that thrilled through my very soul. Absorbed as I had hitherto been in a tearless inexorable despair, I could not avoid sympathizing in the distress of this affectionate animal; my heart melted within me and I remained upon the same spot caressing and N " weeping over the dog, until the moon threw her cold beams around me, when I returned to the Hermitage to pass the night in it, for the first time without wife or child, silent, miserable, and alone!... 1 ( I have performed the promise made to my poor wife upon her death-bed of recording our miserable history, that in case any vessel should hereafter touch at our burial-place, for such this island may be termed, our sad fate might be made known to our friends in England, and, above all, to our poor child. Bless thee! bless thee! bless thee a thousand times, my darling boy! How have I refrained so long from mentioning thee? thou art all that now remains to thy wretched father, and yet he shall never see thee more! If thou wert dead, methinks, I could better bear it, than to know that thou art alive-to yearn after thee with my whole soul, and yet to be cut off from thee by a living death. Were it not that any certainty of my fate must be better than suspense, I could hardly wish thee to learn what miseries I have already endured. And what am I GGG still doomed to suffer? God knows.d; Away with the thought I dare not ask my heart the question. “I have buried my wife—Is havé buried my daughter. I have written their history and cording to my promise, deriving a melan choly solace from from making the detail as circum stantial as possible. I have placed in the little chapel iron-box saved from the wreck, that it t it may receive and preserve my manuscript and what now remains for me to do? Unsupported by companions, unexcited by my first employments of building, and exploring, and collecting provisions, released from the occupation of my manuscript, my stagnant mind already begins to prey fearfully upon itself. Were I compelled to seek my daily food it would be a blessing; the necessity of providing for the body would subdue those intolerable cravings of the mind. How happy were all the shipwrecked solitaries of whom I have ever read in comparison with myself! They were all uneducated, or at least, upir tellectual men, whose hearts needed less than |