I reached the end of the walk before aware of it; when I saw a cottage, towards which I bent my steps. It was small, yet tastefully adorned with jessamine, honey-suckles, and rose-trees, with a neat flower-garden in front, inclosed by a hawthorn hedge; and while admiring its varied beauties, an elderly female made her appearance, whose physiognomy and whose manners were very prepossessing. After a little desultory conversation, as I stood resting my arm on the top of her little wicket-gate, she invited me to come in and rest myself. I accepted her invitation, and soon found that I was in the society of one of the Lord's "hidden ones." My hostess was a widow, whose husband had been dead about seven years. She informed me that her father, a man of piety and of wealth, had given her an education becoming his station; that at the age of seventeen she yielded herself to God, as one alive from the dead, and before she reached her twentieth year, she was married to one of the most amiable and one of the most attentive men that ever became a husband. A kind Providence smiled upon them during the first twelve years of their wedded life, when a series of disasters befell them, which turned their paradise of bliss into a valley of weeping. Her father having made some large speculations in the wool-trade, lost the whole of his property, and not having been inured to affliction in his earlier days, his vigorous constitution gave way, and he died, exclaiming, "Though I have lost all my worldly substance, yet the pearl of great price is still mine." The insolvency of her father shook public confidence in the commercial respectability of her husband, who was soon obliged to call together his creditors; and though there was more than sufficient property to meet their demands, yet, by making him a bankrupt, they did not receive quite half their amount. When his affairs were wound up, and he had obtained his certificate, his friends raised a subscription for him, and he recommenced business; but the hand of the Lord was against him, and he could not succeed. An interesting daughter, who, from the age of seven years, had been seeking the Lord, was so overwhelmed by the afflictions of her parents, that she fell into a rapid decline; and though there were occasionally some bright prospects of her recovery, yet at last the night of death came and sealed up the vision of life. The father, who was a man of a very delicate frame, gradually sank beneath his accumulated trials, and left his widow with a son, without any resources for their future maintenance. Her son was sent to a boarding-school, where he was educated at the expense of his uncle; and as the place of her nativity had lost all its attractions, she chose to retire to the lonely cottage in which I found her, where He who multiplied the widow's oil has never suffered her to want any good thing.