y power of love seemed to have
been crushed from his heart, by years of cold neglect and harsh
unkindness.

Weeks, months passed, without any event that might awaken the young
solitary from his torpor. By day, he roved through the island, or lay
listlessly under the shadow of a tree; by night, he slept beneath the
rocks which had first sheltered him; while the fruits, that grew and
ripened without his care, gave him food. Thus he lived a merely animal
life, his strongest sensation one of satisfaction for his relief from
positive suffering, but with nothing that could be called joy in the
present, and with no hope for the future; one to whom God had given an
immortal spirit, capable of infinite elevation in the scale of
intelligence and happiness, and whom man had pressed down to--ay,
below--the level of the brutes, which sported away their brief existence
at his side. Such tyranny as he had experienced, is rare; but its
results may well give an impressive, a fearful lesson, to those to whom
are committed the destinies of a being unconnected with them by any of
those ties which awaken tenderness, and call forth indulgence in the
sternest minds. Let them beware, lest the "iron rule" crush out the life
of the young heart, and darken the intellect by extinguishing the light
of hope.

Terrible was the retribution which his crimes wrought out for the author
of our young hero's miseries. When he received the intelligence from the
men whom he had sent in the morning to bring him from the island, that
he was nowhere to be found, he read in their countenance what his own
heart was ready to repeat to him, that he was his murderer; for neither
they nor he doubted that the terrified boy had rushed into the sea, and
been drowned in the effort to escape the horrors raised by his wild and
superstitious fancy. From that hour his persecutor suffered tortures as
great as his bitterest enemies could have desired to inflict on him. The
images which drove him with increased eagerness to the bottle, became
more vivid and terrific under the influence of intoxication. He drank
deeper and deeper, in the vain hope to banish them, and died ere many
months had passed, shouting, in his last moments, alternate prayers and
curses to the imagined form of him whom he supposed the hope of revenge
had conjured from the ocean grave to which his cruelties had consigned
him.

Five months passed over Edward Hallett, in the dead calm of an existence
agitat