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

569

The Last Man