broke down all her anxiously matured plans for the completion of the education of her daughter Jane, and probably a more pathetic wail was never wrung from a mother's sorrow-stricken heart :

"I received your letter, and I know you will be very angry with me for not answering it sooner. Indeed, I have been angry with myself a thousand times, but you know it is an Herculean labour for me to write a letter, and I have wrote two this last week, so you may suppose it will cost me a good deal of exertion to write another. Poor Jane left Edinburgh the Tuesday after you saw her, in a very ill state of health indeed; and she is very little better yet, if at all, and I am sorely alarmed about her. William laughs, or pretends to laugh, at my fears; but I have always thought her mind and body too delicate to be long an inhabitant of this world. I wish I could say with Eli, 'It is the Lord let Him do to me as it seemeth Him good;' but this is far from being the language of my heart. But I must learn submission, and

I trust the Almighty Author of our being, who has implanted those tender feelings in the breast of His creatures, will pardon the effects of them in the hour of severe trial."

Referring in the same letter to her son Robert's recent appointment to the office of schoolmaster of Kinross parish, she remarks:

"Your brother has been busy with his school examination, which took place last Monday. You must write him soon, and tell us what class of people your scholars are mostly composed of -whether they will call forth the exercise of your talents as a classical teacher, or if they will lie dormant, like your brother's in Ormiston."

In a letter dated 14th August, 1822, only a month after her daughter's death, there are again sad indications of impending bereavement. Edward, her youngest child, then eleven years

of age, having three weeks previously begun to exhibit symptoms of a lingering illness, under which he gradually sank in March, 1824. During this trying period of nearly two years, Mrs. Begg seems to have been engrossed in ministering to her dying boy, and there is only one solitary letter from her in the interval. It is dated 5th December, 1823, and it still dwells painfully on her fears and anxieties for the wanderer of the family.

"I received your last letter with much pleasure, as I grew very anxious about your long silence, and I had hoped that you would be able to give me some intelligence of my poor, lost, deluded Gilbert; but now these hopes are fled, and what am I to think or what am I to do? It is impossible to describe the painful feelings which this sad uncertainty has given me. For

goodness sake tell me what John supposes. What were his motives for going away, what society he had (for he would hardly go by himself), and if he never heard of him after he left Hamilton. He must have taken some desperate step, or some dreadful thing has befallen him, or we must have heard something of him by this time, I am lost in conjecture, and every idea that I can form is replete with horror. I hope you will write me soon; but you can have no comfort to give me, for all my sufferings, painful as they have been, fall short of this. I wish you could advise me what to do with James. He is

grown very anxious to uncertain what to do.

get away, and I am still

A shopkeeper or baker

are the only things he makes choice of. The former I would prefer from the superior society (comparatively) to which it would introduce him, but I am afraid the latter will be most easily attained. Tell me what you think. Poor Edward is much fallen off since you saw him. He is walking on crutches, as he can make very little use of his limbs. The doctor has been teasing him with blisters, seemingly with very little hope of success; but we are willing to do what we can, but I fear his delicate constitution

will not be able to stand much. All the rest are well. You must excuse this short letter; I will write you a longer one next time. God bless you, into whose all-sufficient protection I commend you."

The death of her youngest child was a heavy trial to Mrs. Begg. She had already sustained bereavement and misfortune greater than that which falls to the lot of most women, and nothing but her natural energy of character, and calm dignified self-possession, enabled her to bear up under this bitter accumulated sorrow. That it created a void in her existence as permanent as it was painful was evidenced by the frequency with which pathetic allusions to "my little Edward" dropped casually from the aged mother's lips, down even to