either of myself or my father. Her illness was now pronounced to be a
determined putrid fever, and she was continually in a delirious state. Her
infant son, William, had been kindly received to nurse by an excellent
neighbour, Mrs. Patient of Compton, a most worthy lady, who nursed him and
her own son together, with great good-nature and ease to herself.

My mother grew worse and worse, and was at length pronounced by the
physician past all hopes of recovery. My poor father was frantic; he, who
possessed the most manly resolution and firmness upon all other occasions,
was now by excessive grief and despair reduced almost to the level of a
child; he alternately wept and prayed; but he wept and prayed in vain. I
was at this time under seventeen years of age, and I had scarcely time to
vent my sorrow. Although I was distressed beyond measure at the suffering
of my mother, yet the affliction, the indiscribable anguish, of my father
demanded almost as much of my attention as the illness of my mother. To
see his noble soul bent down to the earth, driven almost to the madness of
desperation, was to me a more heart-rending spectacle than the delirium
which produced a sort of stupor in my mother. She had not been sensible
for any considerable period of time together for two days; and we were
under dreadful apprehensions that she would be taken from us without ever
recovering her reason. This my poor father dreaded excessively; yet the
very thing we most prayed for, proved, when it was ultimately granted to
us, our greatest affliction; so incapable are poor frail mortals of
judging what is best for them under such trying circumstances.

My mother had now lain as it were in a doze for about two hours, and my
father and myself, who were anxiously watching every breath, observed her
awake up, as if it were from a sound sleep; she appeared to feel as if she
had recovered from a trance; she spoke; and to the great joy of my father
and myself she was perfectly collected. But our joy was of the most