will not be a
living creature at his bedside.'

"Hearing this, I ventured to make some inquiries. The answers painted
such a melancholy picture of poverty and suffering, and so vividly
reminded me of a similar case in my own experience, that I forgot I
was an invalid myself, and volunteered to visit the dying man in Mr.
Morphew's place.

"The messenger led me to the poorest quarter of the city and to a garret
in one of the wretchedest houses in the street. There he lay, without
anyone to nurse him, on a mattress on the floor. What his malady was,
you will not ask to know. I will only say that any man but a doctor
would have run out of the room, the moment he entered it. To save the
poor creature was impossible. For a few days longer, I could keep pain
in subjection, and could make death easy when it came.

"At my next visit he was able to speak.

"I discovered that he was a member of my own profession--a mulatto from
the Southern States of America, by birth. The one fatal event of his
life had been his marriage. Every worst offence of which a bad woman can
be guilty, his vile wife had committed--and his infatuated love clung
to her through it all. She had disgraced and ruined him. Not once, but
again and again he had forgiven her, under circumstances which degraded
him in his own estimation, and in the estimation of his best friends. On
the last occasion when she left him, he had followed her to Montreal.
In a fit of drunken frenzy, she had freed him from her at last by
self-destruction. Her death affected his reason. When he was discharged
from the asylum, he spent his last miserable savings in placing a
monument over her grave. As long as his strength held out, he made
daily pilgrimages to the cemetery. And now, when the shadow of death was
darkening over him, his one motive for clinging to life, his one reason
for vainly entreating me to cure him, still centred in devotion to the
memory of his wife. 'Nobody will take care of her grave,' he said, 'when
I am gone.'

"My love, I have always thought fondly of you. After hearing this
miserable story, my heart overflowed with gratitude to God for giving me
Carmina.

"He died yesterday. His last words implored me to have him buried in
the same grave with the woman who had dishonoured him. Who am I that
I should judge him? Besides, I shall fulfil his last wishes as a
thank-offering for You.

"There is still something more to tell.

"On the day before his death he