Such endearing tenderness, graced with the most innocent and yet most powerful charms, brought me insensibly into my right understanding; and when I considered all the transactions of my life, and particularly my new engagement, that I had now one child already born, and my wife big of another; and that I had no occasion to seek for more riches, who already was blessed with sufficiency, with much struggling I altered my resolutions at last, resolving to apply myself to some business or other, which might put a period to such wandering inclinations.  Hereupon I bought a little farm in the county of Bedford, with a resolution to move thither; upon this there was a pretty convenient house surrounded with land, very capable of improvement, which suited my temper, as to planting, managing, and cultivating.  Nor was I long before I entered upon my new settlement, having bought ploughs, harrows, carts, waggons, horses, cows, and sheep; so that I now led the life of a country gentleman, and as happy in my retirement as the greatest monarch in the world.  And what made me think my happiness the greater was, that I was in the middle state of life, which my father had so often recommended, much resembling the felicity of a rural retirement, which is elegantly described by the poet in these lines: 

Free from all vices, free from care, Age has no pain, and youth no snare.

But, in the midst of this my happiness, I was suddenly plunged in the greatest sorrow that I could possibly endure; for when I least expected it, my dear and tender wife was forced to submit to the irresistable power of Death, leaving this transitory life for a better.  It is impossible for me to express the beauties of her mind, or the loveliness of her person; neither can I too much lament her loss, which my latest breath shall record; her influence was greater over me, than the powers of my own reason, the importunities of friends, the instructions of a father, or the melting tears of a tender and disconsolate mother; in a word, she was the spirit of all my affairs, and the centre of my enterprizes.  But now, since the cruel hand of Death had closed my dearest’s eyes, I seemed in my thoughts a stranger to the world; my privy counsellor being gone, I was like a ship without a pilot, that