ed to him all the comfort and consolation which it was in her power to bestow, or in his nature to receive; for it distressed her much to find that he manifested great hardness of heart, and that he was alike insensible to her sufferings and his own disgrace. But she had not seen him since his trial. She had not, indeed, been able to get so far, for her recovery, after lying in, was slow; and she was still extremely feeble and delicate, when, at the expiration of about six weeks, she learned, by a harsh letter from her brutal husband, that if she "wanted to see him again," she must go to Monmouth before a day named, as he was on that day to be conveyed, with other convicts, to the seaport whence they were to embark for New South Wales. She did wish to see him again; and it was on the following morning of that very Sabbath evening, in the month of July, when her father set forth to visit her, as already mentioned, that she intended to do so.

Mr. Lloyd was desirous of seeing his daughter, not only to prepare her, by his conversation, for the melancholy task of taking, in all probability, a last farewell of one who, criminal and churlish as he was, was still her husband, but also to arrange with her the time and manner of proceeding to Monmouth the next morning, whither he intended accompanying her himself. He found her weeping over her last born, which lay asleep in her lap. He did not chide her tears, for they were the natural channels of her grief; but in his twofold character of her spiritual and paternal monitor, he applied himself to assuage the sorrow which was their fruitful source.

And

he had the consolation to observe, ere he departed, that Hester was so far tranquil and resigned, as to discourse calmly upon her approaching interview with David.

In this frame of mind he left her, and in this frame of mind he found her the following morning, when, at the early hour of five, she met him, as had been agreed upon, at the foot of the gentle ascent which rises ab

ruptly from the site of the picturesque ruins of Tintern Abbey. She had her infant in her arms, and was accompanied by a neighbor's daughter, a hale buxom wench about fifteen, who kindly offered to go with her, and help carry the child, a labor for which the still impaired health and delicate frame of Hester were hardly sufficient. They set forth, Hester leaning for support upon her father, having, at his suggestion, transferred her sleeping baby to the care of her young companion.

No possible human pain or sorrow could so deaden the perceptions of natural beauty in souls susceptible of its influence, as wholly to destroy the effects of such scenery as meets the eye between Tintern and Monmouth. The thick woody acclivities which fringe the opposite bank of the river; the rich meadows and green steeps which run shelving from the hills to the water's edge, on the hither side; the picturesque little hamlet of Brook-Weir; the smooth translucent bay formed by the Wye, in front of the romantically-beautiful village of Landogs, built upon a lofty hill whose indented side is mantled with deep woods; the ruins of the castle of St. Briavels; the white sails of small vessels occasionally gliding along; the solemn stillness of the whole scene, and its surpassing magnificence, might drive away, for a time, all memory of past grief, and extinguish all sense of present wretchedness. The face of sorrow reflects the placid smile of surrounding nature; the bruised heart catches her repose; and the weary spirit revives, beneath those feelings which lift it to the Divine Author of so much loveliness, while gazing, with silent gladness, upon its refreshing features.

Hester felt all the benign influence of this consolation from without; and when they arrived in Monmouth, she expressed an eager desire to go at once to the prison, anxious to have the full benefit of her composed and reanimated feelings, in the interview with her husband. It was well she

mother. He was the father of her children. Ill usage may destroy all the finer sympathies which hallow those relations in a woman's gentle and affectionate nature: but it is death alone, or its equivalent, eternal separation in this world,-that can make her feel she has no longer a husband, and her children no longer a father. And when that feeling does come, it will wring the bosom with a sorrow unlike any other.

Hester returned to her father's house that day, and remained there thenceforward with her two children. The cottage which she had occupied since her marriage, was given up; and the produce of the little furniture it contained, when sold, her husband's creditors allowed her to keep, out of respect for herself, and pity for her misfortunes. It was an additional burden which Mr. Lloyd was ill able to bear; but his trust was in Him whose command it is that we should succor the distressed, protect the fatherless, and do all manner of good. In the bosom of her family, in the discharge of her maternal duties, in the Occupation afforded her by superintending the education of the daughters of some of her neighbors, which enabled her to meet many of her own personal expenses, without drawing upon her father's slender means, and in the peaceful retreat of the valley of Tintern, her mind gradually recovered much of its former tranquillity. A more pleasing retreat could not easily be found. "The woods and glades intermixed," to adopt the language of one who has been pronounced an oracle in all that concerns the picturesque," the winding of the river, the variety of the ground,-the splendid ruin, contrasted with the objects of nature, and the elegant line formed by the summits of the hills which inIclude the whole, make altogether a very enchanting piece of scenery. Everything around breathes an air so calm and tranquil, so sequestered from the commerce of life, that it is easy to conceive a man of warm imagination, in monkish times, might have

been allured by such a scene, to become an inhabitant of it."

In such a scene did Edmund, the son of David Morgan, pass his youth; and had he lived in "monkish times," by such a scene would his warm imagination have been allured, and he himself have become a monk of holy Tintern. It was his supreme delight, while yet a boy, to wander the livelong day amid the wild and craggy steeps, the tangled thickets, the solitary glens, and the variously wooded slopes, of that magnificent amphitheatre, laid out by the hand of nature. It was no less his delight to linger round the ruins of the venerable abbey, as the shadows of evening descended upon them, or when the pale moon partially illuminated their grey walls, or streamed in trembling radiance through the ivy-wreathed windows. At such moments, his imagination would carry him back to the period when it was the abode of living piety; when the vesper hymn pealed along its echoing cloisters; and when all the pomp and solemnity of a religion which inflamed the mind by the seduction of the senses, reigned in sacred grandeur beneath its roof. Sometimes he would people the ruin with the creations of his heated fancy, summon from their graves the shadowy forms of holy men who had died there in ages past, and half believe he saw the visions of his brain embodied before his eyes. In such a place as this, at such an hour, If aught of ancestry may be believed, Descending angels have conversed with men,

And told the secrets of the world unknown.

At the period now described, Edmund Morgan was in his thirteenth year. He was no common boy; and his grandfather, who had watched the dawnings of his character, moral and intellectual, prided himself upon his cultivation of both. Enthusiasm was its basis. In whatever he engaged, it was with the whole energy of his nature. It may be supposed, therefore, that he quickly mastered those branches of knowledge which were within the compass of Mr. Lloyd to teach,

and who was also anxious that he should have the advantage of a more comprehensive education. But how was his benevolent desire to be accomplished? He was too poor to pay for it, and he was too friendless to obtain it from patronage. Accident, at length, if such events in the life of man may rightly be called accidents, shaped his destiny. Some trifling circumstance, so unheeded at the time, that no distinct recollection of it survived the occurrence, brought him into contact with an eccentric old gentleman of the neighborhood, who had signalized himself on more than one occasion by the apparent caprice with which he bestowed his bounty. The last act of the kind which had been talked of, was his stocking a small farm for an industrious young man, and giving him besides a hundred pounds to begin with, to whom he had never spoken till he called upon him to announce his intention. But he had observed him frequently, in his walks, laboring early and late, in a little garden which was attached to his cottage; and had learned, upon inquiry, that he kept an aged mother, and a sister who was a cripple, out of the workhouse, by his scanty earnings. It was Edmund's good fortune to attract the notice of Squire Jones, in the way described; and it was not long after that he paid a visit to Mr. Lloyd, for the express purpose of asking a few questions about him. The good old man spoke with pride and affection of his pupil and grandson, but with despondency of his future prospects. "I have reared him as my own," said he, "from his cradle, and I should close my eyes in peace, if I could know, or reasonably hope, so goodly a branch would not be left to float like a worthless weed upon the stream of time."-" He shall be planted," replied Squire Jones. "Send for the boy. But never mind, just now. You know in what soil he will be most likely to thrive. I shall call again to-morrow. By that time make your choice, and leave the rest to me." The morrow came-the

choice was made-and Edmund was to study for the Church, at Oxford, (the great ambition of his youthful mind,) upon an ample allowance secured to him by Squire Jones, in such a way as nothing but his own misconduct could forfeit.

If Edmund was the pride of his grandfather, he was no less the idol of his mother, who would sometimes think that Heaven had bestowed such a treasure upon her, in compensation for what it had taken away. Perhaps her love for Edmund was somewhat heightened, by the circumstance that she had lost her first child when it was only four years old, and he had become, therefore, her only one; but, in truth, his own affectionate disposition, his ingenuousness of character, and his intellectual endowments, were, of themselves, sufficient passports to all the love of a fond mother's heart. And Hester was a fond mother, though not a weak one. She looked forward, with dejected feelings, to the now approaching moment of her first separation from her dear boy; but she was too gratefully conscious of the benefit he was to derive from that separation, to repine at it.

There had always been one subject, which, whenever it occupied the thoughts of Hester, was most painful and distressing to her. It was the mystery of Edmund's birth. She could not tell him his father was a convict, and she had no reason to believe any one else had done so. She could not even tell him that he lived; for from the moment of his leaving Monmouth prison, down to that of which we are now speaking, no tidings of him had reached her. Neither he nor old Morgan had written a single line to any relative or friend they had left behind. All she ever learned concerning him, was, that he had arrived safely at New South Wales. Edmund, when a child, would often talk of his father, merely because the word was constantly upon the lips of his playmates, and because he saw they had fathers. But as he grew older, and began to reflect, a thousand little

circumstances presented themselves to his mind, which convinced him there was some mystery, though he knew not what, that hung over his infancy. Once, and only once, be asked his mother, "WHO is my father? And WHERE is he?" But the silent agitation of Hester, for she could not answer him, sealed his lips upon that subject ever afterwards.

Edmund was in his sixteenth year when he went to the University, and he remained there, with the usual visits at home during the vacations, till he was one-and-twenty. The progress he made in his studies, and the character he bore for strict propriety of conduct, well justified the munificent liberality of his patron. But he was denied one gratification, that of glad dening his grandfather's pride in him, by the display of his scholastic attainments. The good old man, full of years and ripe in virtue, had breathed his last, from the gradual decay of nature, rather than from the inroads of disease, not long after he had seen the wish nearest his heart realised. Edmund was with him when he died, and he followed him to the grave with feelings which emphatically told him how he could have loved and how mourned -a father! By the interest of his benefactor, (who, the more he saw, and the more he knew of Edmund, found what had originally borne the stamp of a benevolent whim merely, gradually assuming the better quality of a permanent desire to befriend him,) the curacy of Tintern was reserved for his benefit, when he should be duly qualified, by ordination, to assume its pastoral functions. Meanwhile, the place of Mr. Lloyd was supplied by a neighboring clergyman, to whom the fatigues of double duty were sweetened by something beyond the allotted stipend, out of the purse of Squire Jones.

The Rev. Edmund Morgan was in his three-and-twentieth year, when, as the curate of Tintern, he took possession of the little parsonage house in which his youth had been passed, and which was endeared to him by

the recollection of almost every incident in his yet spring-tide of life, that could shed a charm upon the retrospect. He brought to his sacred office a larger stock of theological erudition, and a mind naturally of a higher order, than had belonged to his grandfather; but in the purity of his life, in the holiness of his zeal, and in his exemplary discharge of the numerous duties that belong to a faithful minister of the gospel, he had an example ever present to his memory, which it was his constant prayer he might be able to follow. One only circumstance troubled the calm and peaceful flow of the serene current of his life. A heavy grief-some untold sorrow-lay like a canker at his mother's heart; its ravages were undermining her health, and contracting, with fearful rapidity, the already too little space which stretched between her and the grave. Her wan features, her secret tears, whose traces were frequently visible in her swollen eyes when she appeared at the breakfast table, and those unbidden sighs that would burst from her at times, as if her heart were full to breaking, caused Edmund many a sleepless night, and many a waking hour of melancholy thoughts. There had ever been so much of unreserved communication between himself and his mother, upon all things save this one, that he felt he had here no right to intrude upon the sanctuary of her grief, because he concluded she must have sufficient reasons for drawing around it so impenetrable a veil. When, however, he perceived what inroads it was making upon a life so dear to him, he could no longer be restrained by these delicate considerations. A higher duty than even the respect inspired by filial obligations-the sacred duty of his calling, which enjoined him to breathe the word of comfort over the wounded and mourning spirit, made him resolve to seek an opportunity of tenderly imploring from his mother a disclosure of the affliction that preyed thus fatally upon her peace of mind. But ere he found an opportunity,