proved and encouraged him, were convinced that their efforts had been of no avail. Intemperance, 'like the strong man armed,' took possession of a soul that lifted no cry for aid to the Holy Spirit, and girded on no weapon to resist the destroyer.

Summer passed away, and the anniversary of their arrival at the colony returned. It was to Jane Harwood a period of sad and solemn retrospection. The joys of early days, and the sorrows of maturity, passed in review before her, and while she wept, she questioned her heart, what had been its gain from a Father's discipline, or whether it had sustained that greatest of all losses -the loss of its afflictions.

She was alone at this season of self-communion. The absences of her husband had become more frequent and protracted. A storm, which feelingly reminded her of those which had often beat upon them when homeless and weary travellers, had been raging for nearly two days. To this cause she imputed the unusually long stay of her husband. Through the third night of his absence she lay sleepless, listening for his steps. Sometimes she fancied she heard shouts of laughter, for

the mood in which he returned from his revels was various. But it was only the shriek of the tempest. Then she thought some ebullition of his frenzied anger rang in her ears. It was the roar

of the hoarse wind through the forest.

All night

long she listened to these sounds, and hushed and sang to her affrighted babe. Unrefreshed she arose, and resumed her morning labours.

Suddenly her eye was attracted by a group of neighbours, coming up slowly from the river. A dark and terrible foreboding oppressed her. She hastened out to meet them. Coming towards her

house was a female friend,

agitated and tearful,

who, passing her arm around her, would have spoken.

"Oh, you come to bring me evil tidings; I pray you let me know the worst."

The object was indeed to prepare her mind for a fearful calamity. The body of her husband had been found, drowned, as was supposed, during the darkness of the preceding night, in attempting to cross the bridge of logs, which had been partially broken by the swollen waters. Utter prostration of spirit came over the desolate mourner.

Her

energies were broken, and her heart withered. She had sustained the privations of poverty and emigration, and the burdens of unceasing labour and unrequited care, without murmuring. She had lain her first born in the grave with resignation, for faith had heard her Saviour saying, 'Suffer the little child to come unto me.' She had seen him, in whom her heart's young affections were garnered up, become a 'persecutor and injurious,' a prey to vice the most disgusting and destructive. Yet she had borne up under all. One hope remained with her, as an anchor of the soul,' the hope that he might yet repent and be reclaimed. She had persevered in her complicated and selfdenying duties with that charity which beareth all things, believeth all things,-endureth all things.'

But now, he had died in his sin. The deadly leprosy which had stolen over his heart, could no more be 'purged by sacrifice or offering forever.' She knew not that a single prayer for mercy had preceded the soul on its passage to the High Judge's bar. There were bitter dregs in this grief,

which she had never before wrung out.

Again the sad-hearted community assembled in their humble cemetry. A funeral in an infant colony awakens sympathies of an almost exclusive character. It is as if a large family suffered. One is smitten down whom every eye knew, every voice saluted. To bear along the corpse of the strong man, through the fields which he had sown, and to cover motionless in the grave that arm which trusted to have reaped the ripening harvest, awakens a thrill deep and startling in the breast of those who wrought by his side during the burden and heat of the day. To lay the mother on her pillow of clay, whose last struggle with life was, perchance, to resign the hope of one more brief visit to the land of her fathers,-whose heart's last pulsation might have been a prayer that her children should return and grow up within the shadow of the school-house and the church of God, is a grief in which none, save emigrants, may participate. To consign to their narrow, noteless abode, both young and old, the infant and him of hoary hairs, without the solemn knell, the sable train, the hallowed voice of the man of God, giving back, in the name of his fellow Christians, the most precious

roses of their pilgrim path, and speaking with divine authority of Him who is the 'resurrection and the life,' adds desolation to that weeping with which man goeth downward to his dust.

But with heaviness of an unspoken and peculiar nature was this victim of vice borne from the home that he troubled, and laid by the side of his son, to whose tender years he had been an unnatural enemy. There was sorrow among all who stood around his grave, and it bore features of that sorrow which is without hope.

The widowed mourner was not able to raise her head from the bed when the bloated remains of her unfortunate husband were committed to the earth. Long and severe sickness ensued, and in her convalescence a letter was received from her brother, inviting her and her child to an asylum under his roof, and appointing a period to come and conduct them on their homeward journey.

With her little daughter, the sole remnant of her wrecked heart's wealth, she returned to her kindred. It was with emotions of deep and painful gratitude that she bade farewell to the inhabitants of that infant settlement, whose kindness,