Now, this was not, in all respects, pleasant to Mr. Sedley. Authority is gratifying, no doubt, under certain conditions, and when it can be enforced. But in this case, those conditions were wanting, and all that Mr. Sedley got for his occasional outbreaks of despotic temper was the timid fear of those to whose confiding love he thought he had a right, and the contempt and daring rebellion of the few to whom he looked for unlimited obedience. If Mr. Sedley was disappointed in his fancy-drawn pictures of an emigrant life (on which he ought never to have entered, because totally unfitted for it), his wife and children were confirmed in their prophetic dread of it. To have exchanged a respectable family mansion in a quiet country town, a bevy of well-conducted servants, a circle of friends and acquaintances, the delights of leisurely occupations, the conveniences of life in general, for a rough log-house in what to them was a desert, with all its disadvantages and drawbacks, was simply disgusting. They had not been accustomed to hardships, and the freedom they might have exercised and enjoyed in their new home, and which to many others would have been a boon of price, was to them mere slavery. We have thought proper to drew attention to, and to dwell for a minute or two on, this state of things at Sedley Station, as the settlement was called, for a reason of our own. It is a benevolent one: let this suffice. To go on with our episodal sketch. The Sedleys were to pass through deeper trials than the disappointments and coarse toils of an emigrant life. Not many years after their settling down at the station, a fever (introduced, as was supposed, by a miserable, half-starved wretch who was loafing his way from settlement to settlement professedly in search of work, and who was taken in out of charity, and suffered to remain for some days to recruit his strength) broke out among them. Only those who have passed through a like experience can fully enter into the terrors of that time. At first, recourse was had to the family medicine chest which the Sedleys had brought out with them from London. This failing, the nearest doctor was sent for. He lived full thirty miles away, and he came to find two of the stricken ones already dead, two in a state of collapse, the remaining two in the earlier stages of the fever, and the parents, who had been deserted by their faithless helps at the outbreak of the sickness, in almost speechless agony of mind, and worn out with bodily fatigue. A few weeks later, and the home was desolate. Of all who had, a few years before, left a happy home in England, only two remained—the father, prematurely aged, and Helen, a maiden of fifteen; the fever had carried off all beside—the mother last of all. She had been spared, upheld as it seemed by the strength of a mother's devotion, till her services were no longer needed, and then she too was stricken down.