ighbours could tell me little, till I lighted
on a poor woman who acted as nurse in these perilous times. She told me
that all the family were dead, except Merrival himself, who had gone mad--
mad, she called it, yet on questioning her further, it appeared that he was
possessed only by the delirium of excessive grief. This old man, tottering
on the edge of the grave, and prolonging his prospect through millions of
calculated years,--this visionary who had not seen starvation in the
wasted forms of his wife and children, or plague in the horrible sights and
sounds that surrounded him--this astronomer, apparently dead on earth,
and living only in the motion of the spheres--loved his family with
unapparent but intense affection. Through long habit they had become a part
of himself; his want of worldly knowledge, his absence of mind and infant
guilelessness, made him utterly dependent on them. It was not till one of
them died that he perceived their danger; one by one they were carried off
by pestilence; and his wife, his helpmate and supporter, more necessary to
him than his own limbs and frame, which had hardly been taught the lesson
of self-preservation, the kind companion whose voice always spoke peace to
him, closed her eyes in death. The old man felt the system of universal
nature which he had so long studied and adored, slide from under him, and
he stood among the dead, and lifted his voice in curses.--No wonder that
the attendant should interpret as phrensy the harrowing maledictions of the
grief-struck old man.

I had commenced my search late in the day, a November day, that closed in
early with pattering rain and melancholy wind. As I turned from the door, I
saw Merrival, or rather the shadow of Merrival, attenuated and wild, pass
me, and sit on the steps of his home. The breeze scattered the grey locks
on his temples, the rain drenched his uncovered head, he sat hiding his
face in his withered hands. I pressed his shoulder to awaken his attention,
but he did not alter his position. "Merrival," I said, "it is long since we
have seen you--you must return to Windsor with me--Lady Idris desires
to see you, you will not refuse her request--come home with me."

He replied in a hollow voice, "Why deceive a helpless old man, why talk
hypocritically to one half crazed? Windsor is not my home; my true home I
have found; the home that the Creator has prepared for me."

His accent of bitter scorn thrilled me--"Do not tempt m