“My dear sister,” said Mrs. Eldon, “don’t attempt that. You need repose—If you overtask yourself now, you may feel the ill effects all your life.” “That is what my dear, kind husband says,” replied Mrs. Allen. “And oh,” she continued, with much emotion, “you don’t know, Charlotte, how my conscience reproaches me for my former want of consideration—for my unkindness, in fact, to him. You always told me he was not strong, but I thought it was only one of your notions, and I laughed at his dislike of early rising, and had, in short, no sympathy for much that I now am convinced was bodily indisposition. Formerly, I could not comprehend what possible good it could do him, _even_ supposing, according to you, that he was not well, to rise an hour later in the morning. The idea seemed to me absolutely absurd. And now when I wake so languid, I feel that an hour’s rest is of such infinite importance, and I ask myself, ‘Where is the use in getting up?—what matters it whether the household commences its daily routine an hour earlier or later?’ Charlotte, I sometimes feel that this breaking down of my health is sent as a punishment, and a lesson to teach me sympathy and mercy for those of a naturally different constitution from my own.” When Mrs. Eldon repeated this observation of Mrs. Allen’s to her husband, he dryly remarked that, “it was a pity the lesson had not come earlier.” Pecuniary losses, too, fell heavily upon the Allens about this time. A public institution failed, in which Mr. Allen had invested much of his wife’s property. It had never been an institution in which she had much confidence, and when he had consulted her on the subject, she decidedly objected to the changing certain for what she considered uncertain property. But Mr. Allen, as we have said, was a weak man, who, when he had once got a notion in his head, never rested until he had executed it. He was just sufficiently under his wife’s influence to make him conceal the fact when it was done. If circumstances discovered it, he would only reply to her remonstrances, which were not always of the gentlest, “Well, well, it is done now, and there is no use in talking about it.” Sarah was not often to be pacified in that way, and if any thing could have provoked her more than the facts themselves, it would have been the quiet, meek, yet obstinate air withal, with which he listened to her lectures on the subject. Either Sarah was not the woman she once had been, or the magnitude of the present offence seemed to stun her into silence, for she bore with dignity and fortitude what she felt to be a serious misfortune. What was grief to her, was matter of gossip, however, to the circle of her immediate acquaintance, and that, too, not always in the most sympathizing and good-natured spirit. “Are you not sorry for the Allens?” inquired one of her set. “It is said they have lost the greater part of their fortune in this company that has just failed.”