foresight, saw that she was legally married, the day she reached her
nineteenth year, to the person whom, there is every reason to think,
he believed to be the most unexceptionable man of his acquaintance--
in other words, to himself. Settlements were unnecessary between
parties who had so long been known to each other, and, thanks to the
liberality of his late master's will in more ways than one, a long
minority, and the industry of the ci-devant head shopman, the
nuptial benediction was no sooner pronounced, than our family
stepped into the undisputed possession of four hundred thousand
pounds. One less scrupulous on the subject of religion and the law,
might not have thought it necessary to give the orphan heiress a
settlement so satisfactory, at the termination of her wardship.

I was the fifth of the children who were the fruits of this union,
and the only one of them all that passed the first year of its life.
My poor mother did not survive my birth, and I can only record her
qualities through the medium of that great agent in the archives of
the family, tradition. By all that I have heard, she must have been
a meek, quiet, domestic woman; who, by temperament and attainments,
was admirably qualified to second the prudent plans of my father for
her welfare. If she had causes of complaint, (and that she had,
there is too much reason to think, for who has ever escaped them?)
they were concealed, with female fidelity, in the sacred repository
of her own heart; and if truant imagination sometimes dimly drew an
outline of married happiness different from the fact that stood in
dull reality before her eyes, the picture was merely commented on by
a sigh, and consigned to a cabinet whose key none ever touched but
herself, and she seldom.

Of this subdued and unobtrusive sorrow, for I fear it sometimes