at the tempter, and spurn him!--But where is that to be found?--Let me go, then, to meet him!--You will pray for me, Ines,--will you not?--and the children?--No, let them not pray for me!--in my despair I forgot to pray myself, and their prayers would now be a reproach to me.--Ines!--Ines--What? am I talking to a corse?” He was indeed, for the wretched wife had sunk at his feet senseless. “Thank God!” he again emphatically exclaimed, as he beheld her lie to all appearance lifeless before him. “Thank God a word then has killed her,--it was a gentler death than famine! It would have been kind to have strangled her with these hands! Now for the children!” he exclaimed, while horrid thoughts chased each other over his reeling and unseated mind, and he imagined he heard the roar of a sea in its full strength thundering in his ears, and saw ten thousand waves dashing at his feet, and every wave of blood. “Now for the children!”--and he felt about as if for some implement of destruction. In doing so, his left hand crossed his right, and grasping it, he exclaimed as if he felt a sword in his hand,--“This will do--they will struggle--they will supplicate,--but I will tell them their mother lies dead at my feet, and then what can they say? Hold now,” said the miserable man, sitting calmly down, “If they cry to me, what shall I answer? Julia, and Ines her mother’s namesake,--and poor little Maurice, who smiles even amid hunger, and whose smiles are worse than curses!--I will tell them their mother is dead!” he cried, staggering towards the door of his childrens’ apartment--“Dead without a blow!--that shall be their answer and their doom.” “As he spoke, he stumbled over the senseless body of his wife; and the tone of his mind once more strung up to the highest pitch of conscious agony, he cried, “Men!--men!--what are your pursuits and your passions?--your hopes and fears?--your struggles and your triumphs?--Look on me!--learn from a human being like yourselves, who preaches his last and fearful sermon over the corse of his wife, and approaching the bodies of his sleeping children, whom he soon hopes to see corses also--corses made so by his own hand!--Let all the world listen to me!--let them resign factitious wants and wishes, and furnish those who hang on them for subsistence with the means of bare subsistence!--There is no care, no thought beyond this! Let our children call on me for instruction, for promotion, for distinction, and call in vain--I hold myself innocent. They may find those for themselves, or want them if they list--but let them never in vain call on me for bread, as they have done,--as they do now! I hear the moans of their hungry sleep!--World--world, be wise, and let your children curse you to your face for any thing but want of bread! Oh that is the bitterest of curses,--and it is felt most when it is least uttered! I have felt it often, but I shall feel it no longer!”--And the wretch tottered towards the beds of his children.