e will
of her relations, who refused their consent because he was found guilty
of being descended from parents who had no claims to nobility. Monsieur
de la Tour, leaving his wife at Port Louis, embarked for Madagascar, in
order to purchase a few slaves, to assist him in forming a plantation on
this island. He landed at Madagascar during that unhealthy season which
commences about the middle of October; and soon after his arrival died
of the pestilential fever, which prevails in that island six months of
the year, and which will forever baffle the attempts of the European
nations to form establishments on that fatal soil. His effects were
seized upon by the rapacity of strangers, as commonly happens to persons
dying in foreign parts; and his wife, who was pregnant, found herself a
widow in a country where she had neither credit nor acquaintance, and no
earthly possession, or rather support, but one negro woman. Too delicate
to solicit protection or relief from any one else after the death of
him whom alone she loved, misfortune armed her with courage, and she
resolved to cultivate, with her slave, a little spot of ground, and
procure for herself the means of subsistence.

Desert as was the island, and the ground left to the choice of the
settler, she avoided those spots which were most fertile and most
favorable to commerce: seeking some nook of the mountain, some secret
asylum where she might live solitary and unknown, she bent her way
from the town towards these rocks, where she might conceal herself
from observation. All sensitive and suffering creatures, from a sort of
common instinct, fly for refuge amidst their pains to haunts the
most wild and desolate; as if rocks could form a rampart against
misfortune--as if the calm of Nature could hush the tumults of the soul.
That Providence, which lends its support when we ask but the supply of
our necessary wants, had a blessing in reserve for Madame de la Tour,
which neither riches nor greatness can purchase:--this blessing was a
friend.

The spot to which Madame de la Tour had fled had already been inhabited
for a year by a young woman of a lively, good-natured and affectionate
disposition. Margaret (for that was her name) was born in Brittany, of a
family of peasants, by whom she was cherished and beloved, and with
whom she might have passed through life in simple rustic happiness, if,
misled by the weakness of a tender heart, she had not listened to the
passion of a