the new world, than among the companions with whom his earlier
associations would naturally have brought him in communion.

Like himself, his consort was born of one of those families, which, taking
their rise in the franklins of the times of the Edwards and Henrys, had
become possessors of hereditary landed estates, that, by their
gradually-increasing value, had elevated them to the station of small
country gentlemen. In most other nations of Europe, they would have been
rated in the class of the _petite noblesse_. But the domestic happiness of
Capt. Heathcote was doomed to receive a fatal blow, from a quarter where
circumstances had given him but little reason to apprehend danger. The
very day he landed in the long-wished-for asylum, his wife made him the
father of a noble boy, a gift that she bestowed at the melancholy price of
her own existence. Twenty years the senior of the woman who had followed
his fortunes to these distant regions, the retired warrior had always
considered it to be perfectly and absolutely within the order of things,
that he himself was to be the first to pay the debt of nature. While the
visions which Captain Heathcote entertained of a future world were
sufficiently vivid and distinct, there is reason to think they were seen
through a tolerably long vista of quiet and comfortable enjoyment in this.
Though the calamity cast an additional aspect of seriousness over a
character that was already more than chastened by the subtleties of
sectarian doctrines, he was not of a nature to be unmanned by any
vicissitude of human fortune. He lived on, useful and unbending in his
habits, a pillar of strength in the way of wisdom and courage to the
immediate neighborhood among whom he resided, but reluctant from temper,
and from a disposition which had been shadowed by withered happiness, to
enact that part in the public affairs of the little state, to which his
comparative wealth and previous habits might well have entitled him to
aspire. He gave his son such an education as his own resources and those