My mother grew worse and worse, and was at length pronounced by the physician past all hopes of recovery. My poor father was frantic; he, who possessed the most manly resolution and firmness upon all other occasions, was now by excessive grief and despair reduced almost to the level of a child; he alternately wept and prayed; but he wept and prayed in vain. I was at this time under seventeen years of age, and I had scarcely time to vent my sorrow. Although I was distressed beyond measure at the suffering of my mother, yet the affliction, the indiscribable anguish, of my father demanded almost as much of my attention as the illness of my mother. To see his noble soul bent down to the earth, driven almost to the madness of desperation, was to me a more heart-rending spectacle than the delirium which produced a sort of stupor in my mother. She had not been sensible for any considerable period of time together for two days; and we were under dreadful apprehensions that she would be taken from us without ever recovering her reason. This my poor father dreaded excessively; yet the very thing we most prayed for, proved, when it was ultimately granted to us, our greatest affliction; so incapable are poor frail mortals of judging what is best for them under such trying circumstances. My mother had now lain as it were in a doze for about two hours, and my father and myself, who were anxiously watching every breath, observed her awake up, as if it were from a sound sleep; she appeared to feel as if she had recovered from a trance; she spoke; and to the great joy of my father and myself she was perfectly collected. But our joy was of the most transient nature. She looked around in the most melancholy manner, and having enquired where all the children were gone, she expressed a great desire to see them before she breathed her last; for she said she was perfectly sensible of her situation, and she must see her children once more. They had all been removed to the house of a friend, as those who remained were considered in imminent danger from infection, the putrid state of my mother having assumed a very alarming appearance, and no one was now left, except my father, myself, and the nurse; the maid servant having already failed with the fever. My poor father had entreated, nay had commanded _me_ also to save myself by flight; but upon my knees I implored him to let me remain and participate with him in performing the last sad office for my dear mother; I told him that I should break my heart to leave him alone; for he really was now become an object of much greater pity than my dying parent.