, how, of those three
surviving chief _dramatis personae_, two of them--to wit, our hero and
heroine of Heart--gathered many friends about their happy homestead, did
a world of good, and, in fine, furnish our volume with a suitable
counterpoise to the mass of selfish sin, which (at its height in the
only remaining character) it has been my fortune to record and to
condemn as the opposite topic of heartlessness.

If writers will be bound by classic rules, and walk on certain roads
because other folks have gone that way before them, needs must that
ill-starred originality perish from this world's surface, and find
refuge (if it can) in the gentle moon or Sirius. Therefore, let us
boldly trespass from the trodden paths, let us rather shake off the
shackles of custom than hug them as an ornament approved: and,
notwithstanding both parental deaths, seemingly ill-timed for the
happiness of innocence, let us acquiesce in the facts, as plain matters
of history, not dubious thoughts of fiction; and let us gather to the
end any good we can, either from the miserable solitude of a selfish
Dillaway, or from the hearty social circle of our happy married pair.

Need I, sons and daughters, need I record at any length how Maria
mourned for her father? If you now have parents worthy of your love, if
you now have hearts to love them, I may safely leave that theme to your
affections: "now" is for all things "the accepted time," now is the day
for reconciliations: our life is a perpetual now. However unfilial you
may have been, however stern or negligent they, if there is now the will
to bless, and now the heart to love, all is well--well at the last, well
now for evermore--thank Heaven for so glad a consummation. Oh, that my
pen had power to make many fathers kind, many children trustful! Oh,
that by some burning word I could thaw the cold, shame sarcasms, and
arouse the apathetic! Oh that, invoking upon every hearth, whereto this
book may come, the full free blaze of home affections, my labour of love
be any thing but vain, when God shall have blessed what I am writing!

Yes, children, dear Maria did mourn for her father, but she mourned as
those who hope; his life had been forgiven, and his death was as a
saints's: as for her, rich rewarded daughter at the last, one word of
warm acknowledgement, one look of true affection, one tear of deep
contrition, would have been superabundant to clear away all the many
clouds, the many storms of