April, capricious, yet beautiful child of Spring, once more smiled upon
the bleak shores and sterile plains which, when we last beheld them,
were encompassed by the chilling atmosphere, and loomed bleak and
desolate beneath the sombre sky of, to that land at least, unpropitious
winter.

Welcome to all the inhabitants of that rude coast, the return of the
season was hailed with pleasure the deepest, the liveliest, with
gratitude as warm as ever expanded the human heart, by her whom, an
exile from her native shores, had been compelled to sojourn for a season
on its rocky and cheerless wastes. Five months had now elapsed since,
rescued by the kind-hearted sailors, Agnes had become an inmate of the
fisherman's cottage, and these months had seemed to her like a separate
existence, so widely had their experience differed from that of her
accustomed every-day life.

But deem not, gentle reader, that they had been spent by her in sinful
repining at the hardships of her lot. During the first part of her
sojourn among them, severe sickness, caused no doubt by previous
exposure and anxiety, had prostrated her system, and brought her to the
very borders of the grave, but through the unremitting care of Mrs.
Williamson and her daughter, she was restored to health; and full of
gratitude to heaven for this double preservation of her life, which had
been thus vouchsafed, her first inquiry was, how she could best return
the debt of gratitude due to her Father in Heaven, and those through
whose kindly instrumentality she was thus raised up again. Nor was she
long in ascertaining the path of duty, nor hesitating in commencing and
pursuing it with eagerness.