A word about poor Martha, and we have done; nor, indeed, is there any need we should say more than that she was universally known as “Poor Martha” by all their acquaintance. Oh! what patience, submission, and long suffering it takes before the world will confer its degree of Martyr, before they will condescend to visit, even with so cheap a thing as compassion, the life of an enduring self-devotion. Martha had had but one idol all her life, her brother; and although, when he married late in years, she had almost died broken-hearted at the shock, she clung to him and his fortunes, unable to separate from one to whose habits she had been ministering for above thirty years. It was said that originally she was a person of good common faculties, and a reasonably fair knowledge of the world; but to see her at the time of which we now speak, not a vestige remained of either, not a stone marked where the edifice once stood. Nor can this ba matter of wonderment. Who could have passed years amid all the phantasmagoria of that unreal existence, and either not gone clean mad, or made a weak compromise with sanity, by accepting everything as real? Poor Martha had exactly these two alternatives, either to “believe the crusts mutton,” or be eternally shut out from all hope. Who can tell the long and terrible struggle such a mind must have endured? what little bursts of honest energy repelled by fear and timidity? what good intentions baffled by natural humility, and the affection she bore her brother?