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THE TWIN SISTERS; 



A DOMESTIC TRAGEDY OF 1832. 



FOUNDED ON FACT, 



CHAPTER I. 



" Virtue is like precious odours most fragrant when they are crush'd 

 or incensed ; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth 

 best discover virtue." BACON. 



THE trials and triumphs of virtue in the humbler spheres of life 

 have had but few chroniclers. The moralist and the historian have 

 erred almost as widely in their delineation of character when viewed 

 in the lowest ranks of society, as the novelist and the writer of 

 romance. Reality has little to do in either case. A picture is sketched, 

 and coloured, not after Nature, but according to the fancy of the 

 limner. Little is to be seen but masses of light and shadow : the 

 traits of character must not, however, be sought in either extreme, 

 but rather in the neutral tints between them. 



James Asper had fallen a victim to one of those sudden con- 

 vulsions or earthquakes in the commercial world, to which it is liable. 

 The disastrous year of 1825 had broken up all establishments 

 founded upon ruinous speculation and paper currency ; and amongst 

 these Asper had fallen. He was a proud and a selfish man ; and in 

 place of vigorously exercising his energies, to retrieve his dilapidated 

 condition, he meanly absconded, leaving his family to the tender 

 mercies of a host of incensed creditors. The result needs hardly be 

 told. His wife with her two children received the shelter of a wintry 

 hospitality beneath the roof of a relation of her own. She had loved 

 her husband, and doated upon her children : beyond the affections of 

 a wife and mother, however, her capabilities did not extend. She 

 was fitted to make no efforts for their support or her own ; and 

 yielding to the vexation and irksomeness to which she was now 

 doomed, she fretted and plagued herself and friends to such a degree, 

 that at length she was harshly dismissed, and thrown upon the wide 

 world helpless as an infant. A wretched asylum was offered to her 

 by a woman who had formerly lived with her as servant, and was 

 thankfully accepted. It was not long needed ; she pined and 

 drooped, and, though labouring under no describable disease, in a few 

 months died. 



Her orphan children, for orphans in every sense of the word they 

 were, were received into the workhouse ; and here they were shortly 

 joined by their aged grandmother. Thus, from a high pinnacle of 

 comfort and supposed wealth, the innocent children, and their equally 

 innocent grandmother, were plunged almost at once into the most 

 humiliating state to which man can be reduced, entire dependence 

 upon others for his daily support. 



Anne and Jane Asper were twins; and two more lovely and 



