the cotter who struggles to support his wife and
helpless children--the mendicant who begs from door to door--nor even
the felon in his cell--can imagine what he felt in the solitary misery
of his feverish bed. Hard is the heart that cannot feel his sorrows,
when, stretched beside the common way, without a human face to look
on, he called upon the mother whose brain, had she known his situation,
would have been riven--whose affectionate heart would have been broken,
by the knowledge of his affliction. It was a situation which afterwards
appeared to him dark and terrible. The pencil of the painter could
not depict it, nor the pen of the poet describe it, except like a dim
vision, which neither the heart nor the imagination are able to give to
the world as a tale steeped in the sympathies excited by reality.

His whole heart and soul, as he afterwards acknowledged, were, during
his trying illness, at home. The voices of his parents, of his sisters,
and of his brothers, were always in his ears; their countenances
surrounded his cold and lonely shed; their hands touched him; their eyes
looked upon him in sorrow--and their tears bedewed him. Even there, the
light of his mother's love, though she herself was distant, shone upon
his sorrowful couch; and he has declared, that in no past moment
of affection did his soul ever burn with a sense of its presence so
strongly as it did in the heart-dreams of his severest illness. But God
is love, and "temporeth the wind to the shorn lamb."

Much of all his sufferings would have been alleviated, were it not that
his two best friends in the parish, Thady and the curate, had been
both prostrated by the fever at the same time with himself. There was
consequently no person of respectability in the neighborhood cognizant
of his situation. He was left to the humbler class of the peasantry, and
honorably did they, with all their errors and ignorance, discharge those
duties which greater wealth and greater knowledge would, probably, have
left unperformed.

On the morning of the last day he ever intended to spend in the shed,
at eleven o'clock he hoard the sounds of horses' feet passing along
the road, The circumstance was one quite familiar to him; but these
horsemen, whoever they might be, stopped, and immediately after, two
respectable looking men, dressed in black, approached him. His forlorn
state and frightfully wasted appearance startled them, and the younger
of the two asked, in a ton