and all your patience with me during
my illness."

And in a few days, or in a few hours, Aunt
Maria has left for the distant country from
whose bourne no traveller returns. And
Emily remembers with pain every look of
remonstrance, every tone of chiding, every
syllable of impatience, that may have escaped
her during the trial of her aunt's declining
days; while every thoughtful attention, every
long-suffering smile, every agreeable surprise
or pleasure procured for the departed
traveller, shines on the self-recorded page of her
own recent history, like the letters illuminated
with gold and crimson which gleam on
the vellum of a mouldy missal. And Emily,
balancing her own merits and demerits, while
she inspects the mourning wardrobe which is
the consequence of her relative's decease,
becomes a sadder and a wiser girl.

For thus it is, my merry young friends;
not all the tears in the world, not the
sincerest sorrow, can retract one harsh word,
one disrespectful expression, however hastily
or thoughtlessly spoken, however much
provoked. No apology, no heartfelt regret, can
reach the dull cold ear of death. If you,
happen to have wrongfully chided your early
friend who has absented himself for life, to
found a family in New Zealand; if you have
entertained unjust suspicions respecting him,
or if you remember now that what was not
ill-meant at the time must have been ill-taken
at the time, in consequence of circumstances
which flash thus late on your memory; you
can write, you can explain, you can make
straight the apparently crooked conduct, you
can offer sacrificial, peacemaking, compensating
tribute, in the shape of books, useful
implements, seeds and plants, or trinkets, in
testimony that your heart is ever in the
right place. But no epistle, present, or document
from us, can reach the dwellers on the
further shore of the river of life. We shall
go to them; but they cannot correspond with
us. Therefore, my good people, remembering
this, you will take care to err on the right
side; you will prefer to have had too much
forbearance with, to have been too attentive
and respectful towards, to have spoiled, in
short, the elderly acquaintances who still
incumber the scene and stand in your way—
sometimes troublesomely, to having to say
to yourself, when poor old Frumpsy is gone,
"Ah! I shouldn't have snubbed him so short
at our last twelfth-night party;" or to pondering,
when kind-hearted old Miss Stiffkey
is lying cold and motionless in her dark
oaken chamber, "Poor thing! She knew
better than I did, after all. I was wrong to
turn her into ridicule in the way I did."

And who takes care of us when we are
sick and helpless, bed-ridden, with broken
bones, or painful disease? Is it, then, our
playmate, our race-course companion, our
hail-fellow-well-met, our Hermia, or our
Pylades, who gives us mutton-broth and
gruel, who produces our pill-box and potion
as the prescribed hour strikes, who helps us
to sit up in an easy chair while the servant-
kind make our bed, and who passes night
after night with no more cheerful companionship
than that of a rushlight, and a wandering,
irritable, complaining invalid? It may
be a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister,
occasionally; but, as a general rule, the friend
who tends us in sickness or confinement is
older than the comrade who shares the hours
of our health and strength.

Step aside with me, and take a peep at a
child's sick chamber; you might even join
me in serving our turn in the night-watch;
for, sufferers dangerously ill must be watched,
and it is impossible to let others do all the
work without lending a helping hand.
Constant attendance on a beloved patient, night
after night and day after day, must soon
wear out an aged female frame, even though
the heartiest good-will support its efforts.
We, therefore, will sit up to-night and make
an experiment in nursing, while the nurse
herself steals an interval of repose and the
poor little patient passes the dead hours of
the night as well as her state of illness
allows.

The house is hushed. Everybody is in bed.
Before us lie the treasures we are guarding,
on their broad, postless, curtainless bed,—
which is not a bed in the eyes of an everyday
looker-on, but merely a pile of
mattresses. The doctors have caused the curtains
to be removed. At the foot, and outside the
counterpane, there lies a confused bundle of
clothes, inside which is concealed a woman of
sterling metal, though now old and nearly
worn-out. Somewhere within that flannel
petticoat is a living head, as I can hear by its
deep and regular breathing. The robe which
is usually worn as a nether garment now
answers the purpose of veil. That almost
shabby and threadbare shawl carelessly
envelopes the feet and legs; but under what
article of wearing apparel the mid-person is
crouched is more than I can undertake to
guess. Sleep, my friend! Sleep, worthy
creature, with the refreshing intensity which
a good conscience deserves, although a good
conscience may not always insure it.

At the head of the bed, and within the
bed-clothes, is uneasily stretched a poor sick
child. A typhoid fever—the forty days'
malady—is her complaint, and we are
anxiously awaiting the hour of crisis. Life
or death is, till then, a chance; that is to
say, a result which we cannot foresee; for,
existing causes, imperceptible to human eye,
have doubtless already determined the event
and issue. Many diseases in our bodily frame
seem to follow their course as steadily as
fermentation or putrefaction in inanimate
bodies. Neither the doctor's nor the brewer's
skill will always prevent our wine from
becoming vinegar.

It is midnight; the hour when spirits