DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST

THE FEMALE ORATORS

PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD-MILL

GOING OR GONE

FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS

THE WIFE'S TRIAL; OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW. A DRAMATIC POEM

ROSAMUND GRAY, ESSAYS,

ETC.

TO

MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.

Forgive me, BURNEY, if to thee these late
And hasty products of a critic pen,
Thyself no common judge of books and men,
In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.
My _verse_ was offered to an older friend;
The humbler _prose_ has fallen to thy share:
Nor could I miss the occasion to declare,
What spoken in thy presence must offend--
That, set aside some few caprices wild,
Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days,
In all my threadings of this worldly maze,
(And I have watched thee almost from a child),
Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,
I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

ROSAMUND GRAY.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

It was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentlewoman sat
spinning in a little arbor at the door of her cottage. She was blind;
and her granddaughter was reading the Bible to her. The old lady had
just left her work, to attend to the story of Ruth.

"Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her." It was a
passage she could not let pass without a _comment_. The moral she
drew from it was not very _new_, to be sure. The girl had heard it a
hundred times before--and a hundred times more she could have heard
it, without suspecting it to be tedious. Rosamund loved her
grandmother.

The old lady loved Rosamund too; and she had reason for so doing.
Rosamund was to her at once a child and a servant. She had only _her_
left in the world. They two lived together.

They had once known better days. The story of Rosamund's parents,
their failure, their folly, and distresses, may be told another time.
Our tale hath grief enough in it.

It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret Gray had sold
off all her effects, to pay the debts of Rosamund's father--just
after the mother had died of a broken heart; for her husband had fled
his country to hide his shame in a foreign land. At that period the
old lady retired to a small cottage in the village of Widford in
Hertfordshire.

Rosamund, in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, without fortune
or friends: she went with her grandmother. In all this time she had
served her faith