Dear little things! I was much disappointed indeed that I could not get over to see them in autumn, but this saving system which we have been obliged to adopt has made me sacrifice much of my own gratification for the good of the whole."

This letter also contains an expression of sympathy for an interesting young friend who had been left a widow with little or no provision for her earthly comfort, and the genuine earnestness of its terms is pathetically suggestive of the still more bitter experiences she herself had been called upon to undergo some twelve years before :

"I was very sorry to hear of poor Mrs. L's accumulated distresses. What a merciful dispensation that she has no family! What are one's own wants to the sufferings of a widowed mother, surrounded by a number of

dear little beings that she loves as her own life, looking to her for the supply of wants she has not the power to gratify? Oh, it is supereminent misery!"

This letter also discloses a new calamity which had recently added additional bitterness to her already brimming cup of sorrow. Her youngest son, James, a high-spirited lad-the same who, in his tenth year, had expressed so decided a preference for a "pistol" as compared with a "psalmbook "—had broken his apprenticeship as a baker, and had enlisted as a private soldier in the 26th Regiment, then in Edinburgh Castle, on the eve of departure for active service in India. She says:

"Not a single line from poor James, and I know not what to think. Oh, what suffering has that thoughtless boy heaped upon his mother, and, what is worse, upon himself! He will find by this time, if he is still in existence, that a soldier's life is not to be estimated by their duty in Edinburgh Castle. Gilbert says most truly that his profession is no disgrace to him, were it not that the profession is disgraced by so many mean, base scoundrels getting into it that have been kicked out of every other society of men."

In a subsequent letter, dated 2nd

August of the same year, there occurs the following allusion to the same subject:

"I have heard nothing of James since his first letter after reaching Madras, and anxiously have 1 been watching the arrival of the ships from India, but they have brought me nothing but disappointment."

Of this "anxious watching" for news of her soldier son, absorbing twelve

years of her life, the results were only disclosed at her death, when there was found carefully preserved among her domestic treasures a bundle of interesting letters, dating from 1829 to 1840, in which the wanderer detailed his experiences during his military career Stationed first at Madras,

in India.

and afterwards at Taragonee, Meerut, and Ghazeepore, he steadily worked his way upward to the rank of sergeant. In his last letter, written on board the "Ernaad," at Penang, on 20th April, 1840, he informs his mother that he is on his way to China with his regiment, and he adds, with the true ardour of a soldier, "I hope we will have something more to do than the last expedition we

went on; not that the Bengal princes are more inclined to show the white feather, but the Chinese have never been tried, and therefore will be more conceited." The series of letters closes sadly, but not inappropriately, with a formal communication from the War Office announcing his death at Chuzan on the 2nd November, 1840, and enclosing a silver medal which had been

awarded to him for distinguished conduct" in China.

Mrs. Begg's letter of 1829 closes the correspondence from which these extracts are made. Although still under of age and enjoying active,

sixty years

vigorous health, her lack of facility in penmanship naturally led her to devolve