call her own. The failure of the potato
crop, the famine and pestilence which followed, the scourging
laws enacted and enforced by an ignorant Legislature to redress
the calamity, and the claims of money-lenders, swept every inch
of property from under her feet. Her hopes and her prospects
were for ever blighted. Her projects for the improvement of the
wild district over which she had reigned as a sort of native
sovereign were at an end; and she went forth from the roof of
her fathers as a wanderer, without a home, and, as it would
almost appear, without a friend. Never was hard fate less
deserved; for her untiring and active benevolence had been
devoted from her childhood to the comfort and relief of those
who suffered, and her powerful and original mind was
incessantly employed in devising means of moral and physical
amelioration in the condition of the tenantry on her father's
estates. She gave up her whole time to such pursuits, avoiding
the haunts of fashion and those amusements which might be
considered suitable to her age and place, that she might
perform the various duties of physician, almoner,
schoolmistress, and agricultural instructor. Her almost daily
habit was to visit the poor and the sick in the remote recesses
of that wild region, sometimes on foot--more frequently in her
little boat, well provided with medicaments and food, which she
impelled by the vigor of her own arm through the lakes which
stretch along the foot of the mountains. How grievous it is to
reflect that she should so soon have been driven across the
ocean in search of a place to lay her head. The American editor
intimates that the object of her voyage was to collect
materials for literary works. We have no doubt that such was
among her projects; for she was a very distinguished writer,
and would by no means eat the bread of idleness or dependence;
but there is reason to believe that it was a more stringent
compulsion which obliged her, at an advanced period of the
year, and in a peculiarly delicate situation, when even
peasants remain on shore, to encounter the tedium and perils of
a voyage in a sailing vessel. We have heard, in fact, from a
quarter which ought to be correctly informed, that she was
proceeding to the residence of a near relative of her fat