With this encouragement the elder stranger proceeded: “This most excellent man, of whose death I have been speaking, was a clergyman, whose unfortunate sister I married more than twenty years ago. I respected and honored him when I first knew him for the purity and simplicity of his manners. He was of a respectable family, but not wealthy: his living was nearly his whole maintenance. I could never induce him to spend a week with us in town. He always pleaded his parochial duties as demanding his whole attention. It was in vain for me, or for any one else, to suggest any hint respecting preferment or bettering his circumstances by the ordinary means of professional advancement. During the whole of the time I resided in England after my marriage, I saw nothing of my respected brother-in-law. We had, it is true, several letters from him, and letters of a most interesting description. Well would it have been for me, and well for my dear child, and well for my beloved companion, had I regarded these letters as something more than models of epistolary correspondence; had I attended to those kind paternal hints which they contained. They gave me admonition without assuming airs of superiority or the affectations of a would-be hermit. He wrote to me in the world, and as from the world, making allowances for all the temptations with which I was surrounded, and speaking of them as if he had not learned their existence or ascertained their nature merely by the means of books or talk. I was content with admiring the good man’s virtues. I did not seek to imitate them. I suffered one scoundrel after another to creep into an intimacy with me, and in a very few years my patrimony was wasted, and all my inheritance was melted away at the gaming-table.” There was again, at these words, a pause of passionate and deep feeling, but it passed away, and the emotion subsided, and the narrator went on to say: “Then, sir, I became a widower. My beloved partner left me an only child, a daughter, for whom I resolved to live, or, more properly speaking, for whose sake I endeavoured to preserve and support life, which without this stimulus would have been a burden too heavy to be borne. I took my poor little innocent child to this venerable and amiable clergyman. I found even then nothing like reproach. The good man pitied me, and he pitied my child. His pity touched me more sorely and more deeply than any reproaches which human language could have uttered. I felt my heart melt within me. I dared not say a word of exculpation. I stood self-condemned. I proposed to leave my native land, and to seek elsewhere the means of maintenance for myself and my child. He offered to take my little girl and be a father to her: and he has been so.