which, stretching his arms to the
stranger, looked back with a strange smile upon his mother.

"He is safe with me, and I will deliver him to you when you come."

These words the man spoke, looking upon her, as he received him, and
immediately the carriage-door shut, and the noise of its closing wakened
my wife from her nightmare.

This dream troubled her very much, and even haunted my mind unpleasantly
too. We agreed, however, not to speak of it to anybody, not to divulge
any of our misgivings respecting the stranger. We were anxious that
neither the children nor the servants should catch the contagion of those
fears which had seized upon my poor little wife, and, if truth were
spoken, upon myself in some degree also. But this precaution was, I
believe, needless, for, as I said before, everybody under the same roof
with Mr. Smith was, to a certain extent, affected with the same nervous
gloom and apprehension.

And now commences a melancholy chapter in my life. My poor little Fanny
was attacked with a cough which soon grew very violent, and after a time
degenerated into a sharp attack of inflammation. We were seriously
alarmed for her life, and nothing that care and medicine could effect
was spared to save it. Her mother was indefatigable, and scarcely left
her night or day; and, indeed, for some time, we all but despaired of
her recovery.

One night, when she was at the worst, her poor mother, who had sat for
many a melancholy hour listening, by her bedside, to those plaintive
incoherences of delirium and moanings of fever, which have harrowed so
many a fond heart, gained gradually from her very despair the courage
which she had so long wanted, and knelt down at the side of her sick
darling's bed to pray for her deliverance.

With clasped hands, in an agony of supplication, she prayed that God
would, in his mercy, spare her little child--that, justly as she herself
deserved the sorest chastisement his hand could inflict, he would yet
deal patiently and tenderly with her in this one thing. She poured out
her sorrows before the mercy-seat--she opened her heart, and declared her
only hope to be in his pity; without which, she felt that her darling
would only leave the bed where she was lying for her grave.

Exactly as she came to this part of her supplication, the child, who had
grown, as it seemed, more and more restless, and moaned and muttered with
increasing pain and irritation, on a sudden started upright in