Porterfield came with us, and, at such times, our business was to detect distant glimpses of barge, or steamboat, as they successively darted into sight, along such of the glittering patches of the Alabama as were revealed to us in its downward progress through the woods. Our evenings were such as hallow and make the luxury of cottage life--evenings yielded up to cheerfulness, to content and harmony. Between music, and poetry, and painting, my heart was subdued to the sweetest refinements of love. Without the immorality, we had the very atmosphere of a Sybarite indulgence. I was enfeebled by the excess of sweets; and the happiness which I felt expressed itself in signs. These denoted my presentiments. My apprehensions were my sole cause of doubt and sorrow. How could such enjoyments last? Was it possible, with any, that they should last? Was it possible that they should last with me? I should have been mad to think it. But, in the sweet delirium which their possession inspired, I almost forgot the past. The soul of man is the most elastic thing in nature. Those harassing tortures of the heart which I had been suffering for months--those weary days of exhausting doubt--those long nights of torturing suspicion--the shame and the fear, the sting of jealousy, and the suffering--I had almost forgotten in the absorbing pleasures of my new existence. If I remembered them it was only to smile; if I thought of William Edgerton it was only to pity;--and, as for Julia, deep was the crimson shadow upon my cheek, whenever the reproachful memory reminded me of the tortures which I had inflicted upon her gentle heart while laboring under the tortures of my own--when I thought of the unmanly espionage which I had maintained over conduct which I now felt to be irreproachable. But, just at the moment when I thus thought and felt--when I no longer suffered and no longer inflicted pain--when my wife was not only virtue in my sight, but love, and beauty, and grace, and meekness--all that was good and all that was dear besides;--when my sky was without a cloud, and the evening star shone through the blue sky upon the green tops of our cottage trees, with the serene lustre of a May-divinity--just then a thunderbolt fell upon my dwelling, and blackened the scene for ever. I had now been three months a resident in M----, and never had I been more happy--never less apprehensive on the score of my happiness--when I received a letter from my venerable friend and patron, the father of William Edgerton.