THINGS THAT HAPPEN EVERY DAY. NO. I. 499 



event, towards which a happy husband looks with anxious hope, he 

 turned away, and wished it never might arrive. 



The heir apparent to a throne, when ushered into the world, is 

 surrounded by an obedient crowd of accoucheurs and nurses. Even 

 when the child of a private gentleman first sees the light, how great is 

 the array of caudle cups and comfortable things that greet his infant 

 vision, and how sweetly do the affectionate cares of a sister or a friend 

 soothe the sufferings of the mother of the babe. Truly it may be said, 

 that affluence and friendship in the hour of nature's sorrow pluck the 

 sting of suffering half away ; while niggard poverty and cold neglect, 

 add sharpness to the barbed arrows of that adverse time. Lodged in a 

 miserable room in the suburbs of London, without a friend on earth, 

 save the man who had constrained himself to be her husband, to cheer 

 her drooping spirits as the hour drew nigh, the wife of Dacre must have 

 felt with crushing weight the curse which Eve's transgression called 

 from heaven, " in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Dacre did 

 not love he could not love the being whom he strove to cherish and 

 console. Compassion filled his heart, he commiserated her sufferings, he 

 watched her looks, he hastened to anticipate her wants ; yet, he felt, not 

 as one loving, feels when tending his beloved, but as a generous stranger 

 when he strives to soothe a stranger's woe. She leant her head upon 

 his breast, he pressed her forehead with his lips, but pity, cold and 

 distant pity, chilled the pressure ; the warmer one of undoubted love 

 was more than he could proffer or bestow. 



We pass over the birth the christening the burial of the infant 

 for it died within a few weeks and come to a separation of the parents. 

 Ill sorted pair ! Youthful desire on the one side, necessity on the 

 other, brought them together; mistaken generosity made the casual 

 bond indissoluble j and experience daily added to the sum of their 

 misery. 



" Out of sight out of mind," is a proverb of the falsity of which Dacre 

 soon became intensely conscious. A journey of one hundred miles 

 removed him from the object of his aversion, but her shadow still 

 haunted the precincts of his recollection. A hundred days of solitary 

 musing, a hundred rambles through the mountains, or by the lonely sea, 

 a hundred midnights of unsleeping grief, left his spirit worn and 

 dejected, but effaced no record of the past, nor dimmed one lineament of 

 the face remembered with despair. 



The veteran mourner knows how to foil the assaults of grief. She 

 talks to him the live-long day he shuts his ear to her discourse. She 

 plucks him by the skirt he heeds her not. She follows him where'er 

 he goes : her frown calls forth a steady smile ; her threat extorts, at 

 most, a gentle sigh. She lifts her murderous arm and strikes him to the 

 earth ; he falls with patient dignity. A single groan suppressed dis- 

 turbs the chamber of his heart, and when the agony is past he rises to 

 his feet again, and smiles triumphant through his secret tears. But 

 Dacre was in his noviciate. He was a raw recruit on the battle fields of 

 life and suffering, and knew not how to fight the insidious foe. He saw 

 he had committed a grand blunder he was the victim of life's most 

 stupendous misfortune ; and instead of resolutely thinking of something 

 else, he thought incessantly of that. He felt he was in the toils ; but he 

 could not lie down quietly and die. 



How incomprehensible are the arrangements of this world ! Behold 



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