348 FORTY-FOUR YEARS OP 



who. on the day before her death, had counseled me to 

 seek some good woman as a companion, so that the pro- 

 perty which she and I had gathered by means of hard 

 labor should not be squandered and lost to the children. 

 She had further directed my attention to a certain widow, 

 who had never been the mother of any children, and re- 

 commended me to marry her if I could. But at that time 

 I really thought I never could love another woman enough 

 to wed her, and so I told Mary ; to which she replied that 

 she knew me too well to think so ; and that after I had 

 forgotten her I would love another. 



And so it turned out ; for, after I saw that it was abso- 

 lutely necessary for me to have a housekeeper, and the 

 more so as Sally had married, and had notified me tha'> 

 she was going to leave me, I began to make advances 

 toward the little widow, and had reason to believe that 

 she was favorably inclined toward me. But before any 

 engagement was entered into, she was seized with a violent 

 fever, and survived its attacks but a few days. 



I met with this disappointment at a time when I was 

 busily engaged with the assessment, and residing in a 

 hotel, or rather a boarding-house, in Cumberland. The 

 landlord, a man of perhaps forty years of age, had mar- 

 ried a beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, whose situ- 

 ation making it necessary for her to remain in her 

 room, her mother, a widow, forty-four years of age, who 

 had no other child, was residing with her daughter, and 

 attending to the business of the house. Thinking she was 

 the wife of the landlord, I had taken no further notice of 

 her than to see that she was a sprightly as well as excel- 

 lent landlady, and I had boarded one week in the house 

 before I knew that she was a widow. 



At supper one evening, I happened to call her by the 

 name of her son-in-law ; when she replied that she was 

 I o* the wife of the landlord, but the mother of hia wife. 



