overspread his countenance. He eagerly seized the
picture with his feeble hands, and held it to his lips. His oppressed
bosom seemed ready to burst with emotion, and his eyes were filled with
tears which had no power to flow.

"My son," said I, "listen to one who is your friend, who was the friend
of Virginia, and who, in the bloom of your hopes, has often endeavoured
to fortify your mind against the unforeseen accidents of life. What
do you deplore with so much bitterness? Is it your own misfortunes, or
those of Virginia, which affect you so deeply?

"Your own misfortunes are indeed severe. You have lost the most amiable
of girls, who would have grown up to womanhood a pattern to her sex, one
who sacrificed her own interests to yours: who preferred you to all that
fortune could bestow, and considered you as the only recompense worthy
of her virtues.

"But might not this very object, from whom you expected the purest
happiness, have proved to you a source of the most cruel distress?
She had returned poor and disinherited; all you could henceforth
have partaken with her was your labour. Rendered more delicate by her
education, and more courageous by her misfortunes, you might have beheld
her every day sinking beneath her efforts to share and lighten your
fatigues. Had she brought you children, they would only have served to
increase her anxieties and your own, from the difficulty of sustaining
at once your aged parents and your infant family.

"Very likely you will tell me that the governor would have helped you;
but how do you know that in a colony where governors are so
frequently changed, you would have had others like Monsieur de la
Bourdonnais?--that one might not have been sent destitute of good
feeling and of morality?--that your young wife, in order, to procure
some miserable pittance, might not have been obliged to seek his favour?
Had she been weak you would have been to be pitied; and if she had
remained virtuous, you would have continued poor: forced even to
consider yourself fortunate if, on account of the beauty and virtue of
your wife, you had not to endure persecution from those who had promised
you protection.

"It would have remained to you, you may say, to have enjoyed a pleasure
independent of fortune,--that of protecting a loved being, who, in
proportion to her own helplessness, had more attached herself to you.
You may fancy that your pains and sufferings would have served to endear
you to ea