eemed shrouded in gloom and mystery;
and that darkness she received as a token of unregeneracy, as a sign
that she was one of those who are destined, by a mysterious decree,
never to receive the light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Hence,
while her husband was a deacon of the church, she, for years, had sat
in her pew while the sacramental elements were distributed, a mournful
spectator. Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential, she still
regarded herself as a child of wrath, an enemy to God, and an heir
of perdition; nor could she see any hope of remedy, except in the
sovereign, mysterious decree of an Infinite and Unknown Power, a mercy
for which she waited with the sickness of hope deferred.

Her children had grown up successively around her, intelligent and
exemplary. Her eldest son was mathematical professor in one of the
leading colleges of New England. Her second son, who jointly with his
father superintended the farm, was a man of wide literary culture and of
fine mathematical genius; and not unfrequently, on winter evenings, the
son, father, and mother worked together, by their kitchen fireside, over
the calculations for the almanac for the ensuing year, which the son had
been appointed to edit.

Everything in the family arrangements was marked by a sober precision, a
grave and quiet self-possession. There was little demonstrativeness of
affection between parents and children, brothers and sisters, though
great mutual affection and confidence. It was not pride, nor sternness,
but a sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back in each soul
those feelings which are the most beautiful in their outcome; but
after a while, the habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing or
affectionate expression could not have passed the lips of one to another
without a painful awkwardness. Love was understood, once for all, to be
the basis on which their life was built. Once for all, they loved each
other, and after that, the less said, the better. It had cost the
woman's heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier part of her
wedlock, to accept of this _once for all_, in place of those
daily outgushings which every woman desires should be like God's
loving-kindness, "new every morning"; but hers, too, was a nature
strongly inclining inward, and, after a few tremulous movements, the
needle of her soul settled, and her life-lot was accepted,--not as what
she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable