 an image of desolation, as froze up all my faculties. I struggled for articulati∣on. A feeble cry alone escaped me. She started at the sound from her icy stupor; and glanced her eyes every where, with that acuteness of perception which marks a disturbed imagination; then with a long sigh sunk once more into herself. A se∣cond cry, followed by her name, my bounding eager heart pronounced. She half arose; the motion of her lips seemed contending with the drear silence of the moment, but not a murmur broke it,— amazement, horror, the wrings of death transfixed me. Springing up with ethe∣rial lightness, even while her feeble frame shivered with agony and affection, she fixed on my convulsed features a long, long look, then waving majestically a last adieu, rushed again into the balcony. Unable to move a limb; my harrowed soul seemed, through the jar of the ele∣ments, to distinguish her dreadful plunge into the world of waters. A something

too mighty to describe or endure came over me, and sense fled before it.
How long it was ere my careless atten∣dant came to my relief I know not, but a succession of fits, accompanied with dangerous shudderings, and a raging fever seemed every moment to promise me, from the ordination of providence, that relief my lost Rose had ventured to pre∣cipitate. Whether her fatal example, or my sufferings, influenced my tyrant, his persecution entirely subsided; in the short intervals of reason my weakness produced, he condemned his own conduct, bound himself by the most solemn promises to convey me home, and conjured me to struggle for life, if not for my own sake, at least for that of my infant. Alas, my babe! when my cheek felt once more thy tender breathings, I accused myself for wishing to leave thee, and acknowledged the sad necessity of living. My cruel malady robbing the cherub of her natural suste∣nance, it was with difficulty she received any other, and the proposal he made me, of having her baptized, was readily ac∣cepted.

That ceremony was performed the same evening. Alas, my precious in∣fant, no velvet pillowed thy innocent face! no costly canopies preserved it! no noble sponsors, with ready arms, contended to receive thee! no father's blessing followed that of Heaven; thou wert, alas, given by a sordid nurse, to a more sordid chaplain, and by a dim lamp, within a, narrow ca∣bin, thy woeful mother raised her feeble head to see the child of Lord Leicester, a daughter of the House of Stuart, con∣secrated by
