and, in spite of the surgeon and his whole chest of medicines, died:
of all which events there was a circumstantial account, transmitted by
one of his comrades to my mother.

The ruin of prospects so fair, the desolation of a house and homeless
woman, with two orphan children, and pregnant of a third, and the
loss of a husband, who at the worst of times had always kept hope
alive, were sufficient causes of affliction to my mother. Tears were
plentifully shed, and daily and nightly wailings were indulged.

Every resource was soon exhausted, and immediate relief became
necessary. To whom could she apply? To whom, but the rector? She wrote
to him in terms the most moving, the most humiliating, and indeed
the most abject, that her imagination could suggest. But in vain: no
prayers, no tears, no terrors, of this world or of the next, could
move him. The father, and the divine, were equally inexorable. He
pleaded his oath, but he remembered his revenge. After the first
letter he would receive no more, and when she wrote again and again,
with the direction in a different hand, and using other little
stratagems, he returned no answer.

From this extreme distress, and from the intolerable disgrace, as my
mother supposed it to be, of coming on the parish, we were relieved,
to the best of her ability, by a poor widow woman with four children;
who had formerly lived a servant in the Trevor family, and who,
after her husband's death, maintained herself and her orphans with
incredible industry, and with no other aid but the produce of a cow,
that she fed chiefly on the common where her cottage stood. The active
good sense with which she did every thing that was entrusted to her,
was the cause that she never wanted employment; and she exerted her