castle, with Lady Jane? I looked for nothing every moment but 'the thorns and briars of reproof.' But I soon found that the woman whom I thought was a Methodist, was a most entertaining companion. Instead of austerity in her looks and reproach in her language, I found nothing but kindness and affection, vivacity and elegance. While she soothed my sorrows, she strengthened my better purposes. Her conversation gradually revived in my mind tastes and principles which had been early sown in it, but which the world seemed completely to have eradicated.

"'In the neighborhood of the castle, Lady Jane carried me to visit the abodes of poverty and sickness. I envied her large but discriminating liberality, and the means she had of gratifying it, while I shed tears at the remembrance of my own squandered thousands. I had never been hard-hearted, but I had always given to importunity, rather than to want or merit. I blushed, that while I had been absurdly profuse to cases of which I knew nothing, my own village had been perishing with a contagious sickness.

"'While I amused myself with drawing, my aunt often read to me some rationally entertaining book, occasionally introducing religious reading and discourse, with a wisdom and moderation which increased the effect of both. Knowing my natural levity and wretched habits, she generally waited till the proposal came from myself. At first when I suggested it, it was to please her: at length I began to find a degree of pleasure in it myself.

"'You will say I have not quite lost my romance. A thought struck me, that the first use I made of my pencil should serve to perpetuate at least one of my offenses. You know I do not execute portraits badly. With a little aid from fancy, which I thought made it allowable to bring separate circumstances into one piece, I composed a picture. It consisted of a detached figure in the background of poor Stokes, seen through the grate of his prison on a bed of straw: and a group, composed of his wife in the act of expiring, Fanny bending over a wreath of roses, withered with the tears she was shedding, and myself in the horrors in which you saw me,

Spectatress of the mischief I had made.
"'Wherever I go, this picture shall always be my companion. It hangs in my closet. My dear friends,' added she, with a look of infinite sweetness, 'whenever I am tempted to contract a debt, or to give in to any act of vanity or dissipation which may