drawing on the table by her little workbox; she was in the chamber
upstairs; she must come down presently.

Who is this opens the door? I see her sweet face. It was like our little
Mary's when we thought she would die of the fever. There was even
a smile upon her lips. She comes up and kisses me. "Good-bye, dear
George!" she says. Great Heaven! An old man sitting in this room,--with
my wife's workbox opposite, and she but five minutes away, my eyes
grow so dim and full that I can't see the book before me. I am
three-and-twenty years old again. I go through every stage of that
agony. I once had it sitting in my own postchaise, with my wife actually
by my side. Who dared to sully her sweet love with suspicion? Who had a
right to stab such a soft bosom? Don't you see my ladies getting their
knives ready, and the poor child baring it? My wife comes in. She has
been serving out tea or tobacco to some of her pensioners. "What is it
makes you look so angry, papa?" she says. "My love!" I say, "it is the
thirteenth of April." A pang of pain shoots across her face, followed by
a tender smile. She has undergone the martyrdom, and in the midst of the
pang comes a halo of forgiveness. I can't forgive; not until my days
of dotage come, and I cease remembering anything. "Hal will be home
for Easter; he will bring two or three of his friends with him from
Cambridge," she says. And straightway she falls to devising schemes for
amusing the boys. When is she ever occupied, but with plans for making
others happy?

A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down
pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous
object. My corns hurt me, I know, but I suspect my neighbour's shoes
pinch him too. I am not going to howl much over my own grief, or enlarge
at any great length on this one. Many another man, I dare say, has had
the light of his day suddenly put out, the joy of his life extinguished,
and has been left to darkness and vague torture. I have a book I tried
to read at this time of grief--Howel's Letters--and when I come to the
part about Prince Charles in Spain, up starts the whole tragedy alive
again. I went to Brighthelmstone, and there, at the inn, had a room
facing the east, and saw the sun get up ever so many mornings, after
blank nights of wakefulness, and smoked my pipe of Virginia in his face.
When I am in that place by chance, and see the sun rising now, I shake
my fist at him, thin