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The magistrate, the doctor, and the comptroller, now took upon themselves the entire charge of the obsequies of the dead; and the minister was requested to comfort the oppressed and afflicted Ellen, whom this calamity had made as a bruised reed.

The task of those who had to do only with the dead was easy; that of him who was appointed guardian, father, and comforter of the distressed living, was far more arduous.

Miss St. Clyde was confined to her bed; she had not strength left to be at times on foot. And to see Levingstone enter the rooms where her father's and her mother's and her sister's corpses were stretched on bed, was a picture one might ask the youth to visit, who sleeps three nights in a week from beneath his father's roof; and to those whose compass to the haven of ease

and comfort is self-love, one might recommend the unbroken sorrow of the surrounding peasantry.

The sight reflected honour on their common nature; their common sympathy was a libel on the dissembling friendship of a falsely refined life: nothing ever perhaps came up to their grief; and the death of the first-born of every family in a polished city could not have equalled it. It was a week's holidays to the queen of sadness; and she revelled in all the profusion of the miseries, and sufferings, and sorrows of the human heart.

The poorest cotter, the youth and the virgin, the little boy and his tender little sister, the grey-haired man and his grave-verging wife, felt her tyranny.

Now the funeral was to take place. A husband murdered! a wife who had died from madness occasioned by his tragic end! a daughter who had never

spoken or stirred from the moment her father was missing, and she recollected his dream!-these were the corpses which, in conjunction with friends of whom the golden age would have been proud, the distressed Ellen St. Clyde was to bury.

The people assembled from the distant skirts of the island; the whole ground as far as the eye could be thrown for the hills and woods, was covered with spectators. One general feeling penetrated every heart; sympathy and sorrow sat in keen and doleful majesty on every brow! The prospective ruin of a country might have gathered as many of its inhabitants in one undistinguished mass; but here there were no rebels to the strong and unadulterated tone of the human heart. All was sorrow! all was grief! Curiosity had not collected them: the catastrophe! it was this,

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and this alone, combined with the farfamed goodness of the Laird St. Clyde, and his universally beloved wife and estimable daughter; it was the tragic death of those three universally known and valued characters! it was the pride of acknowledging the real worth of the very best of our species, that clasped its arms around the isle, and drew to the house of mourning the baron and the squire, the farmer and his cotter, the beggar and the stranger: and nobody came there that had not a tear to shed.

"By those that deepest feel, are ill expressed
The indistinctness of the suffering breast!
Where thousand thoughts begin to end in one,
Which seeks from all the refuge found in none;
No words suffice the secret soul to show,
And truth denies all eloquence to woe!"

Now the procession moved from the house; and from the house to the burial ground was four miles. Villejuive walked at the head of the Laird St. Clyde's

coffin; the minister of R was at the head of Mrs. St. Clyde's; and the Rev. Mr. Thornhill supported the head of Norah St. Clyde's coffin.

They were not cries the people around uttered; they were dismal yells: they seemed all to be going to the judgement-seat! The torrent of grief with which the thronged road was covered, augmented as the prospect of closing its sources opened on the mourner's view.

The procession now traversed a fine plain, that had once been the field of a sanguinary battle; for the numerous tumuli in parallel lines, showed how lordly grim death had stalked through the contending armies; and the cemeteries that posterity opened, plainly told by the mingled bones, and spears, and shields, and helmets, how richly gay attired the heroes came to battle.

Now it arrived on the brow of a hill,

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