ers, and sisters, sicken
and die. Most of the servants fled on the first appearance of disease,
those who remained were infected mortally; no neighbour or rustic ventured
within the verge of contagion. By a strange fatality Juliet alone escaped,
and she to the last waited on her relatives, and smoothed the pillow of
death. The moment at length came, when the last blow was given to the last
of the house: the youthful survivor of her race sat alone among the dead.
There was no living being near to soothe her, or withdraw her from this
hideous company. With the declining heat of a September night, a whirlwind
of storm, thunder, and hail, rattled round the house, and with ghastly
harmony sung the dirge of her family. She sat upon the ground absorbed in
wordless despair, when through the gusty wind and bickering rain she
thought she heard her name called. Whose could that familiar voice be? Not
one of her relations, for they lay glaring on her with stony eyes. Again
her name was syllabled, and she shuddered as she asked herself, am I
becoming mad, or am I dying, that I hear the voices of the departed? A
second thought passed, swift as an arrow, into her brain; she rushed to the
window; and a flash of lightning shewed to her the expected vision, her
lover in the shrubbery beneath; joy lent her strength to descend the
stairs, to open the door, and then she fainted in his supporting arms.

A thousand times she reproached herself, as with a crime, that she should
revive to happiness with him. The natural clinging of the human mind to
life and joy was in its full energy in her young heart; she gave herself
impetuously up to the enchantment: they were married; and in their radiant
features I saw incarnate, for the last time, the spirit of love, of
rapturous sympathy, which once had been the life of the world.

I envied them, but felt how impossible it was to imbibe the same feeling,
now that years had multiplied my ties in the world. Above all, the anxious
mother, my own beloved and drooping Idris, claimed my earnest care; I could
not reproach the anxiety that never for a moment slept in her heart, but I
exerted myself to distract her attention from too keen an observation of
the truth of things, of the near and nearer approaches of disease, misery,
and death, of the wild look of our attendants as intelligence of another
and yet another death reached us; for to the last something new occurred
that seemed to transcend in horror all