“I believe I was too happy then for it to last. With the spring came the rheumatic fever again, and my poor husband was quite laid up. He could not do any thing, and he fretted so to think his land was not trenched, nor any thing seen to! and, what with the children, and the house, and the cow, and the things out of doors, and poor John to nurse, I had more than one pair of hands could well do. This would not have signified if John had but mended when the summer came, but he got worse and worse. He was so weak, and he suffered a deal of pain, and there was no doctor. Then I did wish we had never left England, and I thought it would have been better we should both have worked and laboured in our own country, till we had got old, and earned enough to marry upon. But we did for the best; and if John was so set upon coming, even without me, why, then, it was best I came too, for he had some one to do for him. It was all written, I suppose; and perhaps ’twas for our good—but this was hard, very hard to bear. “One evening I had got the children off to sleep, and I had taken my bit of work, and was sitting by John’s bedside, when he said to me— “‘Milly, you must not stay here when I am gone. If you sell all the little matters we have got together here, you’ll have enough to pay your journey to Halifax, and your passage home too, as I reckon. Your father will be good to you, I think—I hope. Tell him I meant for the best when I persuaded you to come.’ “Oh, Miss Lucy, I never thought to see that day: I had always hoped I should have been the first to go. But it pleased God otherwise.” The poor old woman sat with her apron to her eyes, in quiet, silent tears. Lucy took one of her withered hands, and pressing it between her own, told her, with tears in her eyes, how much she felt for her, and how much she admired her husband’s kind and manly character. She found this was the chord to which, after so many years, the old nurse’s heart still vibrated. “Yes, Miss Lucy,” and her faded eyes flashed with almost youthful brightness; “he was the kindest-hearted, the truest-hearted, and the bravest-hearted man as ever lived. He feared nothing, but to do wrong, and to part with me. His thoughts were always on me; and when he was taken, the last words he ever spoke were, ‘my own Milly,’ and the last look he ever gave was for me, and my hand felt the last pressure his ever gave.” Lucy’s tears flowed fast. She had read many novels, but the fictitious woes of their heroines did not seem to her half so touching as her old nurse’s plain story.