to follow any train of ideas with force or any accuracy of connection.
Her religion, as I have already shown, was not calculated to be the
torment of a sick bed; and, in fact, during her whole illness, not one
word of a religious cast fell from her lips.

She was affectionate and compliant to the last. I observed on Friday and
Saturday nights, that, whenever her attendants recommended to her to
sleep, she discovered her willingness to yield, by breathing, perhaps
for the space of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps, though
the effort, from the state of her disorder, usually proved ineffectual.

She was not tormented by useless contradiction. One night the servant,
from an error in judgment, teazed her with idle expostulations, but she
complained of it grievously, and it was corrected. "Pray, pray, do not
let her reason with me," was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so
dreadful to the enfeebled frame, as the monotonous importunity of nurses
ever-lastingly repeated.

Seeing that every hope was extinct, I was very desirous of obtaining
from her any directions, that she might wish to have followed after her
decease. Accordingly, on Saturday morning, I talked to her for a good
while of the two children. In conformity to Mr. Carlisle's maxim of not
impressing the idea of death, I was obliged to manage my expressions. I
therefore affected to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been
very ill, and that it would be some time before she could expect to be
well; wishing her to tell me any thing that she would choose to have
done respecting the children, as they would now be principally under my
care. After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of
forms, she at length said, with a significant tone of voice, "I know
what you are thinking of," but added, that she had nothing to