her my protection so long as nothing occurred to make it impossible? I may reply most truly that all my feelings ran naturally in the very opposite channel. So far from confiding too much in my luck, in the present instance I was engaged in the task of writing upon some points of business which could not admit of further delay; but now, and at all times, I had a secret aversion to seeing so gentle a creature thrown even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was in this very point of anxiety as to all that regarded my wife's security. Her good sense, her prudence, her courage (for courage she had in the midst of her timidity), her dignity of manner, the more impressive from the childlike character of her countenance, all should have combined to reassure me, and yet they did not. I was still anxious for her safety to an irrational extent; and to sum up the whole in a most weighty line of Shakspeare, I lived under the constant presence of a feeling which only that great observer of human nature (so far as I am aware) has ever noticed, viz., that merely the excess of my happiness made me jealous of its ability to last, and in that extent less capable of enjoying it; that in fact the prelibation of my tears, as a homage to its fragility, was drawn forth by my very sense that my felicity was too exquisite; or, in the words of the great master-- 'I wept to have' [absolutely, by anticipation, shed tears in possessing] 'what I so feared to lose.' Thus end my explanations, and I now pursue my narrative: Agnes, as I have said, came into my room again before leaving the house--we conversed for five minutes--we parted--she went out--her last words being that she would return at half-past one o'clock; and not long after that time, if ever mimic bells--bells of rejoicing, or bells of mourning, are heard in desert spaces of the air, and (as some have said), in unreal worlds, that mock our own, and repeat, for ridicule, the vain and unprofitable motions of man, then too surely, about this hour, began to toll the funeral knell of my earthly happiness--its final hour had sounded. * * * * *