Mary Pratt no longer mentioned Roswell in her prayers.  She fully believed him to be dead; and her puritanical creed taught her that this, the sweetest and most endearing of all the rites of Christianity, was allied to a belief that it was sacrilege to entertain.  We pretend not to any distinct impressions on this subject ourselves, beyond a sturdy protestant disinclination to put any faith in the abuses of purgatory at least; but, most devoutly do we wish that such petitions could have the efficacy that so large a portion of the Christian world impute to them.  But Mary Pratt, so much better than we can lay any claim to be in all essentials, was less liberal than ourselves on this great point of doctrine.  Roswell Gardiner’s name now never passed her lips in prayer, therefore; though scarce a minute went by without his manly person being present to her imagination.  He still lived in her heart, a shrine from which she made no effort to expel him.

As for the deacon, age, disease, and distress of mind, had brought him to his last hours.  The passions which had so engrossed him when in health, now turned upon his nature, and preyed upon his vitals, like an ill-omened bird.  It is more than probable that he would have lived some months, possibly some years longer, had not the evil spirit of covetousness conspired to heighten the malady that wasted his physical frame.  As it was, the sands of life were running low; and the skilful Dr. Sage, himself, had admitted to Mary the improbability that her uncle and protector could long survive.

It is wonderful how the interest in a rich man suddenly revives among his relatives and possible heirs, as his last hour draws near.  Deacon Pratt was known to be wealthy in a small way; was thought to possess his thirty or forty thousand dollars, which was regarded as wealth among the east-enders thirty years since; and every human being in Old Suffolk, whether of its overwhelming majority or of its more select and wiser minority, who could by legal possibility claim any right to be remembered by the dying man, crowded around his bed-side.  At that moment, Mary Pratt, who had so long nursed his diseases and mitigated his sufferings, was compelled to appear as a very insignificant and secondary person.  Others who stood in the same degree of consanguinity to the dying man, and two, a brother and sister, who were even one degree closer, had their claims, and were by no means disposed to suffer them to be forgotten.  Gladly would poor Mary have prayed by her uncle’s bed-side; but Parson Whittle had assumed this solemn duty, it being deemed proper that one who had so long tilled the office of deacon, should depart with a proper attention to the usages of his meeting.  Some of the relatives who had lately appeared, and who were not so conversant with the state of things between the deacon and his divine, complained among themselves that the latter made too many ill-timed allusions to the pecuniary