Three weeks after I followed my friend to the grave, my beloved wife resigned her gentle spirit into the hands of her Creator. Although long prepared for this heart-rending event, I found myself as unable to support it, when it arrived, as if my foreboding heart, and tortured mind, had not foreseen that it was inevitable. Her dying farewell to our child, and to me, achieved the measure of my despair; and within an hour after she had breathed her last, I was wildly raving, under the influence of a sudden attack of brain fever, from which, for several weeks, the physicians believed I could never recover. During its violence, I imagined myself dead, and believed that I beheld my lost wife, crowned with more than mortal beauty, in the regions of the blessed, holding out her arms to welcome me. Methought I approached to embrace her, when her dead sister interposed between us, and exclaimed, “Away, sinful man, thou who in life presumed to attach thy evil destiny to her sinless one; think not that here, where only the good are permitted to join those loved on earth, thou canst be reunited to her.” /^a