He died in debt, and his little property was seized immediately by his

creditors. My mother, pennyless and burthened with two children, waited

week after week, and month after month, in sickening expectation of a

reply, which never came. She had no experience beyond her father's cottage;

and the mansion of the lord of the manor was the chiefest type of grandeur

she could conceive. During my father's life, she had been made familiar

with the name of royalty and the courtly circle; but such things, ill

according with her personal experience, appeared, after the loss of him who

gave substance and reality to them, vague and fantastical. If, under any

circumstances, she could have acquired sufficient courage to address the

noble persons mentioned by her husband, the ill success of his own

application caused her to banish the idea. She saw therefore no escape from

dire penury: perpetual care, joined to sorrow for the loss of the wondrous

being, whom she continued to contemplate with ardent admiration, hard

labour, and naturally delicate health, at length released her from the sad

continuity of want and misery.

The condition of her orphan children was peculiarly desolate. Her own

father had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had died

long since: they had no one relation to take them by the hand; they were

outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty pittance was

a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as children of peasants,

yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left them, a thankless

bequest, to the close-handed charity of the land.

I, the elder of the two, was five years old when my mother died. A

The Last Man