his early manhood suffered no less from another cause. Oh! may God grant that I shall have the power to render the autumn and the winter of his life happy. I ask no other power, no other pleasure than to live for him, attend upon him, nurse his ailments, bear his petulance with patience, and divert the sorrows which memory may revive by every contrivance my love and imagination may suggest—yes, yes, other people may talk of my large fortune, but I know that it is my dear, good husband, which is Heaven's best boon."
As she spoke thus, in the language of awakened sensibility, Mary became sensible that her heightened colour, her rapid utterance, and the brilliancy of her eye betokened disorder beyond what she had apprehended. She lost no time in sending for an English physician, resident in Pisa, and held a courier in readiness to fetch Parizzi from Rome, feeling all the responsibility which belonged to her situation not less than the tenderest attachment and most perfect esteem for her who was the object of solicitude.
A fever, which soon denied the nutriment required by her babe, rendered a substitute for a mother the most pressing care on poor Mary's mind; but so violently did the invalid oppose this arrangement, that the devoted sister undertook to wean the child herself; and his perfectly healthy state, and naturally good temper, enabled him to
