Grief should never be alone. It is one of the most selfish of our passions. The man of sorrows should be forced into the world--into the bustle, and roar, and change, and activity of life, where against himself outward and passing events shall catch his eye, and force him off if but for a moment from his wretchedness. It will finally loose the grasp of the disease, and thought by degrees may be turned into other channels, and the heart beat with its accustomed excitation. But even this did not save the bereaved husband. Perhaps it might had no other ills assailed him; but he had become reckless--had risked much--had entered largely into the excitements and speculations of the day; and every thing working against him, losses succeeding losses, the poor man sank under it and died--a bankrupt. But the saddest of my story is yet to come. There are some men in this world from whom nature seems to have withholden the commonest feelings of our race--men who have no humanity about them--men who despise and disclaim every thing like sympathy as troublesome and out of place, and who would as lief dwell in a desert or on an island shut out from the whole world, as any where else--save perhaps that they should not have their fellow creatures to prey on. In short, your cool, calculating, miserly souls, whose feelings all begin in self and end in self, and who can like Judas or Shylock, coolly set off so much suffering and so many ounces of human blood against so much money, with the same callousness that they could barter dog’s flesh. It was into the hands of such a wretch, a Mr. Saxelby, that these orphan children fell now entering upon their twelfth year, and their privations it may be relied on were proportionate to _his_ wickedness. The little that had been saved from the wreck of their once splendid fortune he contrived to sink by one means and another, and by the time they were sixteen it was formally announced that their means were exhausted, and that master Lyle Selden and his sister--must either work or starve. It was like a thunder clap. The brother had hoped to study his father’s profession; his talents were commanding, his industry unexampled, and he had proudly looked forward to the moment when he should redeem that father’s lost reputation, and lift his lovely, ah, how lovely sister! into the station which her exceeding beauty seemed so eminently to fit her for, and of which she would become such a witching ornament.