Few men reach fifty without having experienced that there are accidents in life which, as it were, transmute the very nature of the mind. I have felt this change more than once, but never to so great a degree as when I was recovered to the full sense of my loss. Under any circumstances, the calamity would have been unspeakable; my first love was no more, and all the expectations I had cherished of becoming a father, utterly quenched. It seemed to me as if a mortcloth had been thrown upon the future, and that I was doomed, for the remainder of my days, to mourn by the bier of departed happiness, forlorn beside the coffin of my hopes. But the indulgent reader will spare me from describing the agony of grief with which I felt the blow; I only recollect the tidings, and that I awoke in my bedchamber from a hideous dream, which left no image on the memory, but a dark and formless omen of woe, and the long black shadow of something that had passed never to come again.

Fortunately, in the dreadful interval, the troubles of our mercantile affairs began to show themselves;—yes, fortunately, for had it not so come to pass, such was the consternation which had fallen upon me, that the faculties of my mind must have withered. I could think only of the void made by Providence in my lot, and ponder why it had been so suddenly permitted.