out with my hand in my father's hand, we often met him. I grew up from boy to man, and forgot him; but, when, after long years of absence I stood again upon Southampton beach, I thought upon his face; and how he had lived, and walked about there — alone and had died perhaps alone. - - My path homeward led past the door, which I had often seen him enter. I could not help knocking, and asking to see the old landlady. She was dead also; but a daughter of the old lady, a woman past fifty came out, and asked me into her parlour, and answered all my enquiries concerning the remembered stranger with interest, and pleasure. Quakerlike in her dress; quakerlike (or very kind) in her manners, she was just that sort of personage, of whom we find a few scattered here and there, as if ex-, pressly to let a kind of home to the forlorn and solitary members of society's better class, and to give them in the decline of life that benevolent care, that tenderness of attention, which they have no longer either fond relatives, or at tached domestics to supply. It was from her I learned the little circumstances of the morning, when he first came to them. She had gathered them from the poor waiter, who, having been entirely supported by the bounty of this stranger during a severe winter of sickness, and destitution, told her of them with tears of shame. It seemed that he had lived on a small annuity of two hundred a year, and had a thou, sand pounds in the hands of a London banker. This last he never once mentioned during his life-time, always representing himself as a person whose income would die with him, and, in confirmation, keeping a small sealed paper, on which he showed a superscription signifying that it contained a sum sufficient to pay his funeral expenses. When this was opened at his decease it was found to contain a testamentary document, willing the sum of one thousand pounds to his landlady. She said that he was a calm, cheerful, meek man, very kind to the poor, and very considerate to every one; that his health was very delicate; that he read a great deal; was a devout, silent man; seldom speaking on religious subjects, and that, owing to the state of his nerves, and his suffering from head aches, he seldom went to church. She took me up stairs, and showed me the room in which he had lived, and the chamber where he died. In a glass case were a few large old books of history, geography, and travels; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; Thomas a Kempis; Robinson Crusoe; and a black letter Bible. There was also a manuscript volume, written in a very cramped, difficult hand. It seemed a common place book, for in the first few leaves I found only extracts from favourite authors; among others these lines from an old book of emblems, by George Withers. if tempests were not, Such comforts could not by a calm be brought. And immediately after, my eye caught the opening of a narrative, which seemed, as if it were some notice concerning his past life. It This conjecture the perusal of a few pages confirmed. At my earnest request, the kind old lady, cheerfully lent me the volume, on condition that I was to acquaint her with the contents. That condition I have fulfilled, and she has given the manuscript to me. contains the life, and fortunes of a miserable, a deservedly miserable man; a wayward, unstable being. Melancholy, and merited his misfortunes certainly were; yet when I recollected how in my boyhood I had seen the beggars bow down to him; and how the children at play would smile up in his face; how the unhatted orphan would bend, and smooth down his hair to him, and the little charity girl set down her pitcher to drop him a child's curtesy - why I mourned over so early a shipwreck of the hopes, the happiness, and the honor of one so calculated, under different circumstances, to have enjoyed, and adorned existence. THE STORY OF A LIFE. "What is this World? What axen men to have?" FIVE-AND-THIRTY years have passed, since, in that high and happy excitement of feeling, to which even the parting from those who love us lends a new and rapturous emotion, all burning with hope, and exulting to be free, I left my peaceful home. Five-and-thirty years! The "God bless, preserve, and prosper you !" of my anxious father still vibrates on my ear, in the same tremulous tone in which it was uttered. VOL. I. B |