Now I fancy my readers, looking forward to the end, and seeing what a small amount of print is left, blaming me; some, that I have roused curiosity without satisfying it; others, that I have kept them so long over a dull book and a lame conclusion. But out of a life one cannot always cut complete portions, and serve them up in nice shapes. I am well aware that I have not told them the _fate_, as some of them would call it, of either of my daughters. This I cannot develop now, even as far as it is known to me; but, if it is any satisfaction to them to know this much--and it will be all that some of them mean by _fate_, I fear--I may as well tell them now that Wynnie has been Mrs. Percivale for many years, with a history well worth recounting; and that Connie has had a quiet, happy life for nearly as long, as Mrs. Turner. She has never got strong, but has very tolerable health. Her husband watches her with the utmost care and devotion. My Ethelwyn is still with me. Harry is gone home. Charlie is a barrister of the Middle Temple. And Dora--I must not forget Dora--well, I will say nothing about her _fate_, for good reasons--it is not quite determined yet. Meantime she puts up with the society of her old father and mother, and is something else than unhappy, I fully believe. “And Connie’s baby?” asks some one out of ten thousand readers. I have no time to tell you about her now; but as you know her so little, it cannot be such a trial to remain, for a time at least, unenlightened with regard to her _fate._ The only other part of my history which could contain anything like incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing. But I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history with composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily labour of writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think correctly still; but the effort necessary to express myself with corresponding correctness becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes almost appalling. I must therefore take leave of my patient reader--for surely every one who has followed me through all that I have here written, well deserves the epithet--as if the probability that I shall write no more were a certainty, bidding him farewell with one word: _“Friend, hope thou in God,”_ and for a parting gift offering him a new, and, I think, a true rendering of the first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen.” Good-bye. THE END. End of Project Gutenberg’s The Seaboard Parish, Complete, by George MacDonald