!

Poor Eleanor! I cannot say that with me John Bold was ever a
favourite. I never thought him worthy of the wife he had won. But
in her estimation he was most worthy. Hers was one of those feminine
hearts which cling to a husband, not with idolatry, for worship can
admit of no defect in its idol, but with the perfect tenacity of ivy.
As the parasite plant will follow even the defects of the trunk which
it embraces, so did Eleanor cling to and love the very faults of her
husband. She had once declared that whatever her father did should
in her eyes be right. She then transferred her allegiance, and became
ever ready to defend the worst failings of her lord and master.

And John Bold was a man to be loved by a woman; he was himself
affectionate; he was confiding and manly; and that arrogance of
thought, unsustained by first-rate abilities, that attempt at being
better than his neighbours which jarred so painfully on the feelings
of his acquaintance, did not injure him in the estimation of his wife.

Could she even have admitted that he had a fault, his early death
would have blotted out the memory of it. She wept as for the loss
of the most perfect treasure with which mortal woman had ever been
endowed; for weeks after he was gone the idea of future happiness
in this world was hateful to her; consolation, as it is called, was
insupportable, and tears and sleep were her only relief.

But God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. She knew that she had
within her the living source of other cares. She knew that there was
to be created for her another subject of weal or woe, of unutterable
joy or despairing sorrow, as God in his mercy might vouchsafe to her.
At first this did but augment her grief! To be the mother of a poor
infant, orphaned before it was born, brought forth to the sorrows of
an ever desolate hearth, nurtured amidst tears and wailing, and then
turned adrift into the world without the aid of a father's care!
There was at first no joy in this.

By degrees, however, her heart became anxious for another object,
and, before its birth, the stranger was expected with all the
eagerness of a longing mother. Just eight months after the father's
death a second John Bold was born, and if the worship of one creature
can be innocent in another, let us hope that the adoration offered
over the cradle of the fatherless infant may not be imputed as a sin.

It will not be worth our while to define the character of the child