MRS. DOVE was the only child of a clergyman who
held a small vicarage in the West Riding. Leonard
Bacon, her father, had been left an orphan in early youth.
He had some wealthy relations by whose contributions he
was placed at an endowed grammar-school in the country,
and having through their influence gained a scholarship, to
which his own deserts might have entitled him, they continued
to assist him — sparingly enough indeed — at the
University, till he succeeded to a fellowship. Leonard was
made of Nature's finest clay, and Nature had tempered it
with the choicest dews of heaven.

He had a female cousin about three years younger than
himself, and in like manner an orphan, equally destitute, but

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far more forlorn. Man hath a fleece about him which enables
him to bear the buffetings of the storm; —but woman
when young, and lovely, and poor, is as a shorn lamb for
which the wind has not been tempered.

Leonard's father and Margaret's had been bosom friends.
They were subalterns in the same regiment, and, being for a
long time stationed at Salisbury, had become intimate at the
house of Mr. Trewbody, a gentleman of one of the oldest
families in Wiltshire. Mr. Trewbody had three daughters.
Melicent, the eldest, was a celebrated beauty, and the knowledge
of this had not tended to improve a detestable temper.
The two youngest, Deborah and Margaret, were lively, good-natured,
thoughtless, and attractive. They danced with the
two lieutenants, played to them on the spinnet, sung with
them and laughed with them, — till this mirthful intercourse
became serious, and, knowing that it would be impossible to
obtain their father's consent, they married the men of their
hearts without it. Palmer and Bacon were both without
fortune, and without any other means of subsistence than
their commissions. For four years they were as happy as
love could make them; at the end of that time Palmer was
seized with an infectious fever. Deborah was then far advanced
in pregnancy, and no solicitations could induce Bacon
to keep from his friend's bedside. The disease proved fatal;
it communicated to Bacon and his wife; the former only
survived his friend ten days, and he and Deborah were then
laid in the same grave. They left an only boy of three
years old, and in less than a month the widow Palmer was
delivered of a daughter.

In the first impulse of anger at the flight of his daughters,
and the degradation of his family, (for Bacon was the son
of a tradesman, and Palmer was nobody knew who,) Mr.
Trewbody had made his will, and left the whole sum, which
he had designed for his three daughters, to the eldest.
Whether the situation of Margaret and the two orphans

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might have touched him, is perhaps doubtful, — for the family
were either light-hearted or hard-hearted, and his heart
was of the hard sort; but he died suddenly a few months
before his sons-in-law. The only son, Trewman Trewbody,
Esq., a Wiltshire fox-hunter, like his father, succeeded to
the estate; and as he and his eldest sister hated each other
cordially, Miss Melicent left the manor-house, and established
herself in the Close at Salisbury, where she lived in
that style which a portion of £ 6,000 enabled her in those
days to support.

The circumstance which might appear so greatly to have
aggravated Mrs. Palmer's distress, if such distress be capable
of aggravation, prevented her perhaps from eventually sinking
under it. If the birth of her child was no alleviation
of her sorrow, it brought with it new feelings, new duties,
new cause for exertion, and new strength for it. She wrote
to Melicent and to her brother, simply stating her own
destitute situation, and that of the orphan Leonard; she believed
that their pride would not suffer them either to let
her starve or go to the parish for support, and in this she
was not disappointed. An answer was returned by Miss
Trewbody, informing her that she had nobody to thank but
herself for her misfortunes; but that, notwithstanding the
disgrace which she had brought upon the family, she might
expect an annual allowance of ten pounds from the writer,
and a like sum from her brother; upon this she must retire
into some obscure part of the country, and pray God to forgive
her for the offence she had committed, in marrying
beneath her birth, and against her father's consent.

Mrs. Palmer had also written to the friends of Lieutenant
Bacon, — her own husband had none who could assist her.
She expressed her willingness and her anxiety to have the
care of her sister's orphan, but represented her forlorn state.
They behaved more liberally than her own kin had done,
and promised five pounds a year as long as the boy should

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require it. With this and her pension she took a cottage in
a retired village. Grief had acted upon her heart like the
rod of Moses upon the rock in the desert; it had opened
it, and the well-spring of piety had gushed forth. Affliction
made her religious, and religion brought with it consolation,
and comfort, and joy. Leonard became as dear to her as
Margaret. The sense of duty educed a pleasure from every
privation to which she subjected herself for the sake of
economy; and, in endeavoring to fulfil her duties in that
state of life to which it had pleased God to call her, she
was happier than she had ever been in her father's house,
and not less so than in her marriage state. Her happiness
indeed was different in kind, but it was higher in degree.
For the sake of these dear children she was contented to
live, and even prayed for life; while, if it had respected
herself only, death had become to her rather an object of
desire than of dread. In this manner she lived seven years
after the loss of her husband, and was then carried off by an
acute disease, to the irreparable loss of the orphans, who
were thus orphaned indeed.