'The care and attendance upon her little shop now devolved upon Martha, who acted as shopkeeper, cook, housemaid, and nurse. The whole of the transactions, mercantile and domestic, as I have said, being carried on in the same apartment, Hannah was enabled to give things the benefit of her mental supervision; and to one accustomed to the bustle and heartlessness of town business, there was something irresistibly amusing, and at the same time touching, in their simple mode of conducting their business. The shop end of the apartment contained a small counter, a press in which the goods were stowed, a beam over the counter, from which were suspended two pairs of scales. The window contained in three of the panes glass bottles, filled respectively with barley-sugar, caraway comfits, and peppermint drops; in the other three panes there were three varieties of biscuit, that in the centre being composed of gingerbread, the surface of which was rendered very attractive by means of a sprinkling of small coloured caraways. Leaning against the woodwork of the window, there were short tobacco-pipes upheld in a slanting position, and on the sill there was a display of bread of various kinds. The domestic arrangements were on the simplest possible scale: a chair or two, a table, a chest, and two wooden beds, comprised the whole of the furniture. There were also a few books, all of a religious character; and within the bed occupied by Hannah there was a shelf where she deposited any little article which she considered of more than ordinary value. Her cash was kept here in two little cups, the one for silver, and the other for copper.

'For years this system of things went on, every year adding to the sufferings of Hannah. Her fate in this respect may be said to be that of thousands of persons in humble life, whose health is irretrievably impaired by the cold earthen floors on which they spend their lives-for, alas! piety the most sincere is no protection against the action of one of nature's most inflexible laws. Hannah's affliction was from a deep-seated rheumatism throughout the frame; all her joints were frightfully swollen, and her hands contracted, yet no one ever heard her complain. Her only anxiety was an intense desire to preserve her credit with the few respectable dealers in town from whom she had her small supplies of goods. As to her own bodily sufferings, she afforded a beautiful instance of pious resignation, and in her, Christianity shone out something superior to what it usually appears even in the most favourable cases, for hers was of a practical, not a theoretic or formal order of belief. In her periods of greatest distress, she always spoke of the merciful way in which she had been sustained under her bodily anguish, and gratefully acknowledged that her chastening was for her good, and should be looked upon as a source of true consolation and ultimate happiness. This pious frame of mind sustained her to the end, and she died in the blessed hope of realising in a better world the enjoyments which in this were the constant theme of her contemplation.'

THE SOLDIER'S WIDOW.

WITHIN a very few miles of Edinburgh, there lived an old woman, known among her neighbours by the name of 'Auld Susan.' She was the daughter of a small farmer in the north of England, and in early life married a private soldier in a Scotch regiment, which happened to be quartered in the neighbourhood of her father's house. Having been on this account cast off and disowned by her parents, she followed her husband for many years during the early part of the last war, and in time became the mother of four sons, all of whom, as they grew up, attached themselves to the same regiment. After a long course of faithful service, Susan's husband was raised to the rank of sergeant; and as she was industrious and frugal, they contrived to make their situation more comfortable than that of a soldier's family generally is. Susan, however, had too much perilled upon the fortunes of war to continue long free from misery. She accompanied her husband and sons through the whole of the disastrous retreat of Sir John Moore. When the withdrawing army was finally engaged by the French at Coruña, she stood on a rising ground at no great distance from the field of action, ready to take charge of any of her family who might be obliged to retire disabled. While the fight was at the hottest, a wounded officer was borne past her, and on inquiring of the soldiers who carried him as to the fate of her husband and children, she was told that all, except one of the latter, were 'down ;' they had fallen in receiving a desperate charge of French cavalry. At this moment, the tide of battle receded from the part of the field which it had hitherto chiefly occupied, and Susan rushed eagerly forward amidst the dead and dying, in the hope of finding her husband and sons, or at least some of them, still alive. The first sight which met her eyes was the prostrate body of the fourth son, who within the last few minutes had also been brought down, and was now, as she thought, on the point of expiring. Ere she could examine into the condition of the wounded lad, a large party of the enemy's cavalry swept across the field, in full retreat before the British, and she had only time to throw herself over the body of her son, in the desperate hope of protecting him from further injury, when it swept over her like a whirlwind, leaving her with a broken leg and arm, and many severe bruises. In this helpless state she was found after the battle by a few survivors of the company to which she had belonged, and conveyed on board the transports along with the wrecks of the army. On inquiry, she found that the fate of her husband and three eldest sons was too fatally certain;

that of the youngest was less so; his body had not been found; but there was little time for examination, and it seemed almost beyond a doubt that he had also shared the fate of his father and brothers. Upon her arrival in England, the poor woman was sent to the hospital until her wounds were cured, but, after her recovery, was turned out desolate and destitute upon the world. A representation of her case to the War Office was unattended to; nor would her honest pride permit her to persist in importunity. The same independence of spirit forbade her seeking the assistance of her relatives. By means of a small subscription raised among her late husband's comrades, she travelled on foot to the place of his birth near Edinburgh, and with what was left she was enabled to put a few articles of furniture into a cottage which a worthy farmer rented to her for an almost nominal sum. The same kind friend afterwards procured her, although not without difficulty, a small weekly allowance—a mere pittance-from the parish funds, with which, and by means of knitting, spinning, rearing a few chickens, and the various other humble expedients of helpless poverty (for she was disabled from fieldlabour), she contrived to support existence in decency, if not in comfort.

Twelve years had passed away, and approaching age was gradually rendering the lonely widow less and less able to obtain the scanty means of sustenance, when one summer afternoon, as she sat knitting at the door of her cottage, a poor crippled object approached, dressed in rags, and weak from disease and fatigue. From the remnants of his tattered clothes, it was evident he had been a soldier, and the widow's heart warmed towards him, as, resigning to him her seat, she entered the cottage and brought him out a drink of meal and water, being all that her humble store enabled her to offer for his refreshment. The soldier looked wistfully at her as he took the bowl-the next moment it dropped from his hand. 'Mother!' he cried, and fell forward in the old woman's arms. It was her youngest son James, whom she thought she had left a corpse on the fatal field of Coruña. After mutually supposing each other to be dead for the long space of twelve years, these unfortunate beings were doomed to be re-united in this vale of sorrow, mutually helpless, feeble, and destitute. But the love of a mother never dies; the poor widow scrupled not to solicit those aids for her son which she never would have asked for herself; and the assistance of some compassionate friends procured her the means of restoring him to health, although he never regained his full strength.

James's story, from the time of their last parting, was a short and sad one. He had recovered from the temporary trance into which his wound had at first thrown him, had seen his mother's mangled and apparently senseless body lying beside him, and concluding she was dead, had endeavoured to crawl out of the way of further danger, but fell into the hands of a party of the enemy.

He remained a prisoner in France for upwards of two years, when, an exchange having taken place, he was once more placed in the British ranks, and sent with his regiment to North America. He had served there during the whole war with the United States, and was subsequently transferred to a West India station, where his wounds broke out afresh, and his health declined, in consequence of the heat of the climate. Those acquainted with military matters will understand, although the writer of these lines confesses his inability exactly to describe, how a British soldier may be deprived of the recompense to which his wounds and length of service legally and justly entitle him. The poor man we speak of met this unworthy fate. He had, at his earnest request, been transferred into a regiment ordered for England (seeing certain death before him in the tropics), which was disbanded the moment of their arrival, and he was thrown utterly destitute, and left to beg or starve, after all his hardships and meritorious services to his country. Being unable to work, he was compelled to assume the mendicant's degraded habit, and had begged his way down to his father's birthplace in Scotland, in the hope of finding some of his relatives alive, and able to shelter him, when he unexpectedly recognised his old mother in the manner described.

32

EVER was the excitement connected with the discovery of any other metal so intense and so wide-spread as that relating to GOLD. Let us trace some of the extraordinary phases of this excitement, and then glance rapidly at the chief commercial results of the discoveries. But before doing so, it may be well to notice the form or forms in which the metal exists in the natural state.

Gold occurs sparingly in many hard rocks, such as granite, gneiss, mica-slate, chlorite-slate, clay-slate, &c., and sometimes even in limestone and other such rocks. It occurs far more abundantly in quartz, pure unmixed flint, or silex. In igneous or metamorphic rocks, the quartz usually occurs in veins, or in large, irregular bunches or lumps, with veins diverging from them. These veins are most commonly only a few feet wide, and for the most part traverse the rocks in a vertical or highly inclined position. Sometimes, however, veins or irregular masses occur many yards across in every direction; and sometimes, but very rarely, quartz is found in such abundance as to make what even might be called hills of itself. The gold is disseminated in this quartz, sometimes in such exceedingly minute

No. 51.

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