Even thus it was fair to look on--every promise in its little form, that its beauty would have equalled that of its handsome parents; and Mary, as she pressed her lips to its icy forehead, fancied she could trace on those tiny features a resemblance to its father. Old Barbara, perceiving how bitterly the tears of the sufferer were falling on the cheeks of her lost treasure, now interfered. But the mother had still a last request to make. A few downy curls were perceptible on the temples--in colour and fineness resembling her own. She wished to rescue from the grave this slight remembrance of her poor nameless offspring; and her wish having been complied with, she suffered the babe to be taken from her relaxed and moveless grasp. "Leave me the hair," said she, in a faint voice. "Thanks--thanks! I am happy now--I will try to sleep--I am happy--happy now!" She slept--and never woke again. At the close of an hour or two, her anxious husband, finding she had not stirred, gently and silently approached the bedside, and took into his own the fair hand lying on the coverlid, to ascertain whether fever had ensued. _Fever?_ It was already cold with the damps of death! Imagine, if you can, the agony and self-reproach of that bereaved man! Again and again did he revile himself as her murderer; accusing _himself_--her father--her _sister_--the whole world. At one moment, he fancied that her condition had not been properly treated by her attendants; at another, that the medical man ought not to have left the house. Nay, hours and hours after she was gone for ever--after the undertakers had commenced their hideous preparations--even while she lay stretched before him, white and cold as marble, he persisted that life might be still recalled; and, but for the better discrimination of those around him, would have insisted on attempts at resuscitation, calculated only to disturb, almost sacrilegiously, the sound peace of the dead! I was one of the first to learn the heart-rending news of this beloved being's untimely end; for my old woman having asked permission to remain with her through the night, (explaining the exigency of the case,) I could not forbear hurrying to the house as soon as it was day, in the hope of hearing she was a happy mother. Somehow or other, I had never contemplated an unfavourable result. The idea of death never presented itself to me in common with any thing so young and fair; and as I walked through the park, and crossed the bridge, with the white cheerful mansion before me, and the morning sun shining full upon its windows, I thought how gladsome it looked, but could not forbear feeling that, even with the prospect of losing it--even with the certainty of beggary, Everard, as a husband and father, was the fellow most to be envied upon earth!