upon her, and she could not escape from its silent beautiful reproach. The mother and the daughter might both have envied the repose of the solitary abused orphan, who possessed 'a peace they could not trouble.' She soon lost all memory of her aunt's rage and her cousin's injustice, and sunk into quiet slumbers. In her dream she saw her mother tenderly smiling on her; and heard again and again the last words of the old woman: "the Lord bless you, Miss Jane! the Lord will bless you, for your kindness to old Phillis."
If Mrs. Wilson had not been blinded by self-love, she might have learnt an invaluable lesson from the melancholy results of her own mal-government. But she preferred incurring every evil, to the relinquishment of one of the prerogatives of power. Her children, denied the appropriate pleasures of youth, were driven to sins of a much deeper die, than those which Mrs. Wilson sought to avoid could have had even in her eyes; for surely the very worst effects that ever were attributed to dancing, or to romance-reading, cannot equal the secret dislike of a parent's authority, the risings of the heart against a parent's tyranny, and the falsehood and meanness that weakness always will employ in the evasion of power; and than which nothing will more certainly taint every thing that is pure in the character.
The cool reflection of the morning pointed out to Mrs. Wilson, as the most discreet, the very line of conduct justice would have dictated. She knew she could not accuse Jane, without exposing
