“Well! the man as opened the door took pity upon us directly, and bade me come in and sit by the fire. His daughter, a nice girl of fourteen, brought us some potatoes and some milk, and let me share her bed. They would have given me enough to pay my way for the next two days if they had had it to give; but I was forced to ask charity again that night, but it did not seem to give me such a choking in the throat as it did the first time; and I thought how soon we lose our spirit when we get low in the world, and how easy it is to go on from bad to worse! The next night I hoped to get to my husband. They told me to keep along the banks of a great river on my left, where there was something of a path, but ’twas so overgrown with the long rank grass, ’twas not easy to find. The new settlement was near the river-side, for the trees, which the settlers cut some way higher up, drifted down the river till they came to this place, where the ground was particular rich, and then they pulled them ashore, and built themselves log-houses. There were about seven families together, as they told me, and my husband’s house was the farthest but one. How my poor heart did beat all the way I went! I longed so to get there, and I dreaded it so too. I walked on and on, and still I saw no people, nor no huts, nor no fields, and I began to think I must have come wrong; for, though it was all open and flat, I could not see very far before me, for the grass was long, and the rushes very tall, sometimes, by the river-side. Of all the day’s journeys I had come, this did seem to me the longest; but I suppose ’twas only because I was so impatient to get to the end of it. I looked at the sun, and it was not above half-way down. Just then there was a rise in the road, and I could see some smoke, and the roofs of some low huts, and some little patches of ground that were cultivated, and I strained my eyes to try and make out the last but one. I don’t know how I got over the ground, but I soon did reach the first house, and I saw a child at play, and I asked him which was John Roberts’s. I could hardly breathe while he answered, ‘He lives out yonder.’ He lives! and when I heard him say that, I first knew I had been afraid of never seeing John again. “I ran as well as I could to the hut. It looked wretched and half finished; the door was ajar—I pushed it open—there was nobody in the kitchen—I heard no noise—I listened—I did not dare step on. Just then my child cried, and a voice from within said, in a hollow tone, ‘Who’s there?’ I ran into the bed-room, and there lay my husband, sick, pale, and weak, but it was my husband alive, and all seemed well.” “Oh, nurse,” exclaimed Lucy, “I never heard any thing half so interesting in my life. Poor souls! and how was your husband? He got well?”