cold, when she fell almost lifeless to the floor with the little one in her arms, feeling that those children had no mother or protector but her. _I_ cannot tell you as should be told, if told, indeed, at all, of the terrible sorrow that filled her soul, when the little one said to her, “put me back with mamma, she is sleeping!” From that day Delle went with us no more to the village school, neither joined us in our hours of gayety. While she was so young, the cares and anxieties of a woman had overtaken her, and trials which older heads and hearts find it hard to bear, were thick in her path, all that delights the young and excitable, did she most cheerfully forego; I never heard a murmur from her lips. The living witnesses of her mother’s love and life-devotion surrounded her; they forbade every expression, every feeling of impatience, or envious regard of the happiness of others, no worthier than herself. It was a heart-cheering sight, the firmness and perseverance of that strong-minded girl, when the first wildness of her sorrow was passed, and she stood amid that family group, a support, and a counsellor, and guide, plying her little hands on the coarse work with which the neighbors had supplied her. All the counsel and advice of the dead mother she kept most religiously. Never for a moment did she falter in her duty, but no one knows how much of sadness there was in her heart. At the time of his wife’s death, the father seemed to pause for a little in his downward course, for he had loved her once, and remembered well that happy time, and perhaps, but no, I cannot dignify the affection with which still, in his sober hours, he thought of her, with the name of _love_. No, he did not _love_ her in her better days, because love would have prompted him to deeds commensurate with so ennobling and exalting a faculty. Yet when she died, the husband sorrowed for her, and conscience reproached him, too, when he looked for the last time on the care-worn, faded countenance of his departed wife, who had always been his good angel. Still it was not with such sorrow as he should have sorrowed for her, that he followed her to the grave, and then led his little ones back to his home; had it been, he would have sought then, in a better life, to pay a fitting homage to her memory.