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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.

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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.

I

particles as to be invisible, not only to the naked eye, but even to the eye aided by a powerful lens. More commonly, the gold is seen as little yellow specks, flakes, or grains scattered through the quartz. When the quartz has a crystalline structure, which it often has, little nests of gold, likewise crystalline, may be seen imbedded between the interlacing crystals of the quartz. Where the interstices in the quartz are large, these are sometimes entirely filled up with gold; and not unfrequently irregular holes and crevices seem to have been formed in the quartz by decomposition or rottenness, which have sometimes been subsequently filled with gold. In such cases, the gold often assumes irregular forms, such as melted lead will when poured into water-forms which have given people the idea of the gold having been deposited in a state of fusion, a notion in all probability utterly unfounded. How the gold got into the quartz, is a point at present so uncertain, that no man of science would take upon himself the responsibility of answering the question. The size of the irregular lumps thus entangled in the quartz varies greatly, the largest hitherto known single lump in the world being an Australian one of 2166 ounces weight. It is, however, usually found in small flakes, grains, and dendritic strings, weighing only a few grains. The last time the land of any country on the earth slowly rose from beneath the sea, it must of course have been subject to the degrading and destructive power of the breakers, and of the waves and tides and currents, and all that wearing action we now see going on on our own shores daily and hourly before our eyes. The consequence is, that portions of every rock, large or small, have been broken off, washed and dashed about upon beaches, or under shallow water, rolled into pebbles, pounded into sand, or ground down into mud and clay. These pebbles, sand, mud, and clay, have been transported by these moving waters often to great distances from their parent site, the largest and heaviest being generally removed the least distance, but the finer and lighter particles swept sometimes tens, sometimes hundreds of miles away from the rock they were first broken off. Such is the origin of all the mud, clay, sand, gravel, and other loose and incoherent materials we so commonly find beneath the surface in all countries when we dig below the soil, interposed between it and the main body of the solid rock* below. Sometimes these accumulations are entirely wanting, even over large spaces; sometimes they are but a few inches thick, often but a few feet; but occasionally they occur in masses 100 or 150 feet in thickness. They are disseminated with great irregularity, sometimes lying on the tops, or resting on the sides of hills of considerable elevation; but most frequently we find them in the valleys and in the lowest levels of a country, whither moving water would have, of course, the greatest tendency to sweep them.

By rock here, we mean any large regularly formed mass of earthy matter, whether it be hard or soft.

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