HANNAH DYER. 95 



were sair— was softened down by the silent, changeless love of 

 her child : for though Hannah was then a woman in years, her 

 soft, bland, and soothing affections — her artlessness and innocence — 

 made her still a child to her aged parent. The few wants which, 

 in their retired life, they required, were easily supplied by the in- 

 dustry of Hannah, and even furnished those little luxuries which 

 betray a delicate and sensitive mind. The low thatched cottage, 

 almost concealed beneath the clustering branches of the fruit-trees, 

 the patch of garden, parted tastefully into plots for ornament and 

 utility. As I remember, Hannah's flowers were the most beautiful, 

 the most odorous ; few exotics — but filled, like her own heart, with 

 the blossoms of her native land : faint and blushing in their 

 own beauty, no flowers seemed to bloom so richly in their varied 

 hues, as the Roses and fan-leafed Pinks in her garden. She tended 

 them and loved them, and in the icy winter's day she did not forget 

 in the low frost-bitten leaves and roots, the sad remains of those 

 delicious flowers ; she covered and protected them with constant 

 watchfulness, for they were a natural image of her own heart, 

 whose first and only brightness had been sullied, and her summer 

 hopes destroyed, by a more withering breath than the wintery 

 North. The tale of her sorrow has, unhappily, too many prece- 

 dents — she loved and was forgotten. Hannah was not a creature of 

 waywardness and passion, whose love, as the lightning, consumes, 

 or of fickle affections with neither faith nor feeling: her love 

 came silently and sweetly upon her heart, without its jealous excess- 

 es, it occupied every feeling that might be given to the creature 

 without sin to the Creator — to love once was to love for ever. Af- 

 ter the first gloomy prostration of her spirit, collapsed beneath the 

 dead pain of her disappointed hopes, she recovered from the selfish- 

 ness of her sorrow to make peaceful the last days of her mother, 

 who now was the only tie between her and earth. She never re- 

 pined — she seldom wept — and if her step was slow and her look 

 sedate, there was in her pale face no reproach ; the complexion of 

 her thoughts was peaceful — her hope was in God. 



Such is a slight pourtrayment of her whom, when a boy, I used 

 to visit once or twice every week, with one whose custom it was to 

 go and hold sweet converse of heavenly things. I never listened to 

 those low breathings of holiness but I became, for the time, devout ; 

 it touched the poetry of my young heart : and as I gazed upon the 

 pallid face of Hannah, her eyes cast down in modesty before the 

 elder, her thin hands modestly folded on each other — to hear her 

 muttered response following the deep Amen of the poor old widow. 



