Thus was the melancholy of Isabella fed by the very silence in which she was compelled to indulge. Often was her pillow wetted with tears, as she passed in review the several fearful incidents connected with the tale in which her brothers had so deeply interested her, and she would have given worlds at those moments, had they been hers to bestow, to recal to life and animation the beloved but unfortunate uncle and aunt, to whose fate, her brothers assured her, even their veteran friends never alluded without sorrow. Often, too, did she dwell on the share her own fond mother had borne in those transactions, and the anguish which must have pierced her heart when first apprized of the loss of her, whom she had even _then_ loved with all a mother's love. Nay, more than once, while gazing on the face of the former, her inmost soul given up to the recollection of all she had endured, first at Michillimackinac, and afterwards at Detroit, had she unconsciously suffered the tears to course down her cheeks without an effort to restrain them. Ignorant of the cause, Mrs. De Haldimar only ascribed this emotion to the natural melancholy of her daughter's character, and then she would gently chide her, and seek, by a variety of means, to divert her thoughts into some lively channel; but she had little success in the attempt to eradicate reflections already rooted in so congenial a soil. Her sister died very young, and she scarcely felt her loss; but when, subsequently, the vicissitudes of a military life had deprived her for ever of her beloved brothers, her melancholy increased. It was however the silent, tearless melancholy, that knows not the paroxysm of outrageous grief. The quiet resignation of her character formed an obstacle to the inroads of all vivacious sorrow; yet was her health not the less effectually undermined by the slow action of her innate feeling, unfortunately too much fostered by outward influences. By her marriage and the birth of her sons, whom she loved with all a mother's fondness, her mental malady had been materially diminished, and indeed in a great degree superseded, but unhappily, previous to these events, it had seriously effected her constitution, and produced a morbid susceptibility of mind and person, that exposed her to be overwhelmed by the occurrence of any of those afflictions which otherwise she might, with ordinary fortitude, have endured. When therefore intelligence from England announced that her parents had both perished in a hurricane on their route to the West Indies, whither the regiment of Colonel De Haldimar had been ordered, the shock was too great for her, mentally and physically enfeebled as she had been, to sustain, and she sank gradually under this final infliction of Providence.