were empty, so was the house, whose every room we visited.  Adrian called loudly upon Clara’s name, and was about to rush up the near mountain-path, when the door of a summer-house at the end of the garden slowly opened, and Clara appeared, not advancing towards us, but leaning against a column of the building with blanched cheeks, in a posture of utter despondency.  Adrian sprang towards her with a cry of joy, and folded her delightedly in his arms.  She withdrew from his embrace, and, without a word, again entered the summer-house.  Her quivering lips, her despairing heart refused to afford her voice to express our misfortune.  Poor little Evelyn had, while playing with her, been seized with sudden fever, and now lay torpid and speechless on a little couch in the summer-house.

For a whole fortnight we unceasingly watched beside the poor child, as his life declined under the ravages of a virulent typhus.  His little form and tiny lineaments encaged the embryo of the world-spanning mind of man.  Man’s nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried towards their close.  His small hand’s fine mechanism, now flaccid and unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of beauty or of strength.  His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm manhood the bowers and glades of earth—­ these reflections were now of little use:  he lay, thought and strength suspended, waiting unresisting the final blow.

We watched at his bedside, and when the access of fever was on him, we neither spoke nor looked at each other, marking only his obstructed breath and the mortal glow that tinged his sunken cheek, the heavy death that weighed on his eyelids.  It is a trite evasion to say, that words could not express our long drawn agony; yet how can words image sensations, whose tormenting keenness throw us back, as it were, on the deep roots and hidden foundations of our nature, which shake our being with earth-quake-throe, so that we leave to confide in accustomed feelings which like mother-earth support us, and cling to some vain imagination or deceitful hope, which will soon be buried in the ruins occasioned by the final shock.  I have called that period a fortnight, which we passed watching the changes of the sweet child’s malady—­and such it might have been—­at night, we wondered to find another day gone, while each particular hour seemed endless.  Day and night were exchanged for one another uncounted; we slept hardly at all, nor did we even quit his room, except when a pang of grief seized us, and we retired from each other for a short period to conceal our sobs and tears.  We endeavoured in vain to abstract Clara from this deplorable scene.  She sat, hour after hour, looking at him, now softly arranging his pillow, and, while he had power to swallow, administered his drink.  At length the moment of his death came:  the blood paused in its flow —­his eyes opened, and then closed again:  without convulsion or sigh, the frail tenement was left vacant of its spiritual inhabitant.