that it was all a dream, and to endeavour to lure my waking thoughts to wander to the delightful Italian vales, I hoped soon to visit; or to picture some august ruins, where I reclined in fancy on a mouldering column, and escaped, in the contemplation of the heart-enlarging virtues of antiquity, from the turmoil of cares that had depressed all the daring purposes of my soul.  But I was not long allowed to calm my mind by the exercise of my imagination; for the third day after your birth, my child, I was surprised by a visit from my elder brother; who came in the most abrupt manner, to inform me of the death of my uncle.  He had left the greater part of his fortune to my child, appointing me its guardian; in short, every step was taken to enable me to be mistress of his fortune, without putting any part of it in Mr. Venables’ power.  My brother came to vent his rage on me, for having, as he expressed himself, ‘deprived him, my uncle’s eldest nephew, of his inheritance;’ though my uncle’s property, the fruit of his own exertion, being all in the funds, or on landed securities, there was not a shadow of justice in the charge.

“As I sincerely loved my uncle, this intelligence brought on a fever, which I struggled to conquer with all the energy of my mind; for, in my desolate state, I had it very much at heart to suckle you, my poor babe.  You seemed my only tie to life, a cherub, to whom I wished to be a father, as well as a mother; and the double duty appeared to me to produce a proportionate increase of affection.  But the pleasure I felt, while sustaining you, snatched from the wreck of hope, was cruelly damped by melancholy reflections on my widowed state—­widowed by the death of my uncle.  Of Mr. Venables I thought not, even when I thought of the felicity of loving your father, and how a mother’s pleasure might be exalted, and her care softened by a husband’s tenderness.—­’Ought to be!’ I exclaimed; and I endeavoured to drive away the tenderness that suffocated me; but my spirits were weak, and the unbidden tears would flow.  ‘Why was I,’ I would ask thee, but thou didst not heed me,—­’cut off from the participation of the sweetest pleasure of life?’ I imagined with what extacy, after the pains of child-bed, I should have presented my little stranger, whom I had so long wished to view, to a respectable father, and with what maternal fondness I should have pressed them both to my heart!—­Now I kissed her with less delight, though with the most endearing compassion, poor helpless one! when I perceived a slight resemblance of him, to whom she owed her existence; or, if any gesture reminded me of him, even in his best days, my heart heaved, and I pressed the innocent to my bosom, as if to purify it—­yes, I blushed to think that its purity had been sullied, by allowing such a man to be its father.