When this act of duty and piety had been performed, we sought our pillows. As for me, I could not sleep for thinking of my friends and their now desolate house. For even to me, who was to that child almost a stranger, and had been so little used to his presence, this place is no longer the same: all its brightness, life, and spirit of gladness, are gone. Everything seems changed. From every place and scene something seems to have been subtracted to which they were indebted for whatever it was that made them attractive. If this is so to me, what must it be to Marcus and Lucilia? It is not difficult to see that a sorrow has settled upon their hearts, which no length of time can heal. I suppose if all their estates had been swept away from them in a night, and all their friends, they would not have been so overwhelmed as by this calamity--in such a wonderful manner were they each woven into the child, and all into each other, as one being. They seem no longer to me like the same persons. Not that they are not often calm, and in a manner possessed of themselves; but that even then, when they are most themselves, there has a dulness, a dreamy absence of mind, a fixed sadness, come over them that wholly changes them. Though they sit and converse with you, their true thoughts seem far away. They are kind and courteous as ever, to the common eye, but I can see that all the relish of life and of intercourse is now to them gone. All is flat and insipid. The friend is coldly saluted; the meal left untasted, or partaken in silence and soon abandoned; the affairs of the household left to others, to any who will take charge of them. They tell me that this will always be so; that however they may seem to others, they must ever experience a sense of loss; not any less than they would if a limb had been shorn away. A part of themselves, and of the life of every day and hour, is taken from them. How strange is all this, even in the light of Christian faith! How inexplicable, we are ready to say, by any reason of ours, the providence of God in taking away the human being in the first blossoming; before the fruit has even shown itself, much less ripened! Yet is not immortality, the hope, the assurance of immortality, a sufficient solution? To me it is. This will not indeed cure our sorrows--they spring from somewhat wholly independent of futurity, of either the hope, or despair of it,--but it vindicates the ways of the Omnipotent, and justifies them to our reason and our affections. Will Marcus and Lucilia ever rejoice in the consolations which flow from this hope? Alas! I fear not. They seem in a manner to be incapable of belief. In the morning I shall start for Rome. As soon as there, you shall hear from me again. Farewell. * * * * *