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'
If you have seen the picture-gallery of any one old family, you will
remember how the same face and figure - often the fairest and
slightest of them all - come upon you in different generations; and
how you trace the same sweet girl through a long line of portraits -
never growing old or changing - the Good Angel of the race - abiding
by them in all reverses - redeeming all their sins -
'In this daughter the mother lived again. You may judge with what
devotion he who lost that mother almost in the winning, clung to this
girl, her breathing image. She grew to womanhood, and gave her heart
to one who could not know its worth. Well! Her fond father could not
see her pine and droop. He might be more deserving than he thought
him. He surely might become so, with a wife like her. He joined their
hands, and they were married.
'
Through all the misery that followed this union; through all the cold
neglect and undeserved reproach; through all the poverty he brought
upon her; through all the struggles of their daily life, too mean and
pitiful to tell, but dreadful to endure; she toiled on, in the deep
devotion of her spirit, and in her better nature, as only women can.
Her means and substance wasted; her father nearly beggared by her
husband's hand, and the hourly witness (for they lived now under one
roof) of her ill-usage and unhappiness, - she never, but for him,
bewailed her fate. Patient, and upheld by strong affection to the last,
she died a widow of some three weeks' date, leaving to her father's
care two orphans; one a son of ten or twelve years old; the other a girl
-
such another infant child - the same in helplessness, in age, in
form, in feature - as she had been herself when her young mother
died.
'
The elder brother, grandfather to these two children, was now a
broken man; crushed and borne down, less by the weight of years
than by the heavy hand of sorrow. With the wreck of his possessions,
he began to trade - in pictures first, and then in curious ancient
things. He had entertained a fondness for such matters from a boy,
and the tastes he had cultivated were now to yield him an anxious
and precarious subsistence.
'
The boy grew like his father in mind and person; the girl so like her
mother, that when the old man had her on his knee, and looked into
her mild blue eyes, he felt as if awakening from a wretched dream,
and his daughter were a little child again. The wayward boy soon
spurned the shelter of his roof, and sought associates more congenial
to his taste. The old man and the child dwelt alone together.
'
It was then, when the love of two dead people who had been nearest
and dearest to his heart, was all transferred to this slight creature;
when her face, constantly before him, reminded him, from hour to
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