“Ines had, during this period of calamity, unremittingly enforced the application of her daughters to those accomplishments from which she still derived the hopes of their subsistence. Whatever were the privations and disappointments of the day, their musical and other exercises were strictly attended to; and hands enfeebled by want and grief, plied their task with as much assiduity as when occupation was only a variation of luxury. This attention to the ornaments of life, when its actual necessaries are wanted,--this sound of music in a house where the murmurs of domestic anxiety are heard every moment,--this subservience of talent to necessity, all its generous enthusiasm lost, and only its possible utility remembered or valued,--is perhaps the bitterest strife that ever was fought between the opposing claims of our artificial and our natural existence. But things had now occurred that shook not only the resolution of Ines, but even affected her feelings beyond the power of repression. She had been accustomed to hear, with delight, the eager application of her daughters to their musical studies;--now--when she heard them, the morning after the interment of their grandmother, renewing that application--she felt as if the sounds struck through her heart. She entered the room where they were, and they turned towards her with their usual smiling demand for her approbation. “The mother, with the forced smile of a sickening heart, said she believed there was no occasion for their practising any further that day. The daughters, who understood her too well, relinquished their instruments, and, accustomed to see every article of furniture converted into the means of casual subsistence, they thought no worse than that their ghitarras might be disposed of this day, and the next they hoped they would have to teach on those of their pupils. They were mistaken. Other symptoms of failing resolution,--of utter and hopeless abandonment, appeared that day. Walberg had always felt and expressed the strongest feelings of tender respect towards his parents--his father particularly, whose age far exceeded that of his mother. At the division of their meal that day, he shewed a kind of wolfish and greedy jealousy that made Ines tremble. He whispered to her--“How much my father eats--how heartily he feeds while we have scarce a morsel!”--“And let us want that morsel, before your father wants one!” said Ines in a whisper--“I have scarce tasted any thing myself.”--“Father--father,” cried Walberg, shouting in the ear of the doting old man, “you are eating heartily, while Ines and her children are starving!” And he snatched the food from his father’s hand, who gazed at him vacantly, and resigned the contested morsel without a struggle. A moment afterwards the old man rose from his seat, and with horrid unnatural force, tore the untasted meat from his grandchildren’s lips, and swallowed it himself, while his rivelled and toothless mouth grinned at them in