“I cannot think that my boy’s father can have grown cold towards her whose whole life is devoted to him, who fled from home and friends, and took up her abode in a foreign land and amongst strangers, that her darling might not be troubled,—that his _home_ might be peace. Alas! what is _my_ home? But I will not upbraid you. Were I alone, I would be content to die rather than cause you a single pang of uneasiness; but, as my dear Robert knows, I am _not_ alone. God still spares our boy to me, though I much fear that the doctor’s prediction that he would get the better of his ailments when he had turned the age of ten will not be verified. Sometimes as I sit of nights—long, weary, thoughtful nights—watching my sick darling, and thinking of those old times of brief bitter sweetness, I wish that you could see him, so like your own dear self; but the thought is at once hushed, when I reflect on the pain it would cause you to contemplate our poor _fatherless_ boy. I am almost tempted to thank God that he cannot remain much longer on earth; but it is hard, cruelly hard, to see him suffer from _want_ as well as from his painful malady. Do, for the sake of the _old times_, send me a little money, though only a few pounds. There is no other resource for us but the workhouse. At any rate, pray send me an answer to this, and relieve the dreadful suspense that haunts me. “P.S. As I have been, from reasons too painful to disclose to you, compelled to quit the lodgings in V.-street, please direct Post-office, —. Yours, ever true and faithful, ELIZABETH —.” As it happened, the gentleman to whom this villanous epistle was addressed had, till within a few years of his demise, resided in a far-away quarter of the globe, and under such conditions as rendered a ten-years-ago intimacy with any English Elizabeth utterly impossible; but unfortunately his survivors were content to treat the attempted imposture with silent contempt, and a likely opportunity of bringing to proper punishment one of a gang of the most pestiferous order of swindlers it is possible to conceive was lost. It was probably only the _very_ peculiar and exceptionally conclusive evidence that the letter could not apply to Mr. Robert —, that saved his friends from painful anxiety, and perhaps robbery. It is so much less troublesome to hush-up such a matter than to investigate it. To be sure, no one would have for a moment suspected, from the precise and proper behaviour of the man dead and gone, that he could ever have been guilty of such wickedness and folly; but it is so hard to read the human heart. Such things have happened; and now that one calls to mind—