gave them at dinner. The end of the week being holiday, the children's grand supper-party was to come off in the precious baby-house which Miss M'Elroy promised to buy, with the assistance of Mr. Fair, and have it brought to their room very early on Saturday morning. But a sad disappointment awaited all these childish hopes, for Britannia accidentally broke the large looking-glass on the bureau, and the poor girls, trembling lest old Mr. M'Elroy should find it out, ran to Mr. Fair with all their baby-house money, and got him to replace the mirror that same day.

From the first moment that Mr. Wyndham sacrilegiously broke his vow to his dying wife, and took his daughters away from their dead mother's selected guardians for them, the children seemed doomed to misery and neglect and though the calm temper of Britannia made her bear her fate with stoical fortitude, severity and disappointment almost deranged Musidora's excitable disposition, and, indeed, saddened her whole life afterwards.

"Mankind," says Sidney Smith, "are always happier for having been happy; so that if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it. A childhood passed with a due mixture of rational indulgence, under fond and wise parents, diffuses over the whole of life a feeling of calm pleasure, and in extreme old age is the very last remembrance which time can erase from the mind. It is probably the recollection of their past pleasures which contributes to render old men so inattentive to the scenes before them, and carries them back to a world that is past."

How little do the guardians of youth realize all the trifles that lead to the formation of character! "I hardly know," says Greville, "so melancholy a reflection as that parents are necessarily the sole directors of the management of their children, whether they have or have not judgment, penetration, or taste, to perform the task." "Discipline, like the bridle in the hand of a good rider, should exercise its influence without appearing to do so; should be ever active, both as a support and as a restraint, yet seem to lie easily in the hand. It must always be ready to check or to pull up, as occasion may require, and only when the horse is a runaway should the action of the curb be perceptible."

Never were children so unappreciated and, consequently, utterly mismanaged. "A child," says Bishop Earle, "is man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve, or the apple; and he is happy whose small practice in the world can only write his character. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past smiles on the beater. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little

coat, he had got to eternity without a burden and exchanged one heaven for another."

Can any one, with the least experience of the pliability of childhood, believe that Byron would have proved such a miserable, useless being, had he been. reared by a dignified Christian mother? He possessed not only sparkling genius, but a most affectionate, sympathizing, emulating heart; and had these blessed traits of character been healthfully directed, he might, with his miraculous gift of poetry, have proved a blessing to society, by clothing his vigorous thoughts in the language of pure and elevating affection. Let us drop a tear of pity, that a nature so impulsively frank that he gave utterance to every wrong emotion that prudent dunces conceal, has been handed down to posterity so odious as never to be forgiven by those, who, without even his genius or excitability of temperament, might, with such a virago-mother as he was cursed with, have proved as hopelessly and morally undeserving.

One evening Miss Julianna M'Elroy, who always amused herself with the eccentricities of Musidora, came into the room with a Scotch snuff-box in her hand, and said, "Children, everybody should clean their teeth with snuff, to keep them from rotting ;" and she insisted that they should dip their fingers in the box, and rub their teeth. Britannia would not; but Musidora, who often had the toothache, at once commenced to put this horrid stuff into her mouth, and in a short time got so deadly sick, that her nurse had to sit up with her all night; for the nerves of the child were dangerously and violently excited, and she would start and scream at every noise; and indeed did not for a

whole week recover from the effect of this poisonous narcotic.

After a month's absence Mrs. M'Elroy returned from Carolina leaving her daughter convalescing, with another fine baby. But the yellow fever now broke out in Savannah with fearful havoc; and old Mr. M'Elroy, who believed that tar-water could exorcise any plague, rose up at daylight every morning, and compelled every human being in his house to drink a large glass of it; and, strange to tell, though the dead-carts with six corpses in them sometimes passed his door, victims of this all-conquering disease, not a person in the academy took it; though there were thirty boys, who boarded with, and went to school to, this old pedagogue.

This tar-water he concocted by burying several immense stone-jars in the ground, then pouring into them three or four quarts of pure tar, and adding six or eight gallons of hot water; and after three days, having closely covered it with tight-fitting tops to the jars, to prevent the aroma from escaping, he dipped it out, and himself handed it to every individual that belonged to his household; and this singular practice he kept up twenty years, and his family were always healthy.

The moment Mr. Wyndham heard the fearful accounts of the pestilence, he manned his twelve-oared boat, and despatched a most faithful female servant to bring his daughters home. If these little creatures ever reveiled in ecstatic delight, it was to pack up bag and baggage, and obey the order to leave Savannah instantly. And Mr. Wyndham, learning previously how kind Mr. Fair had been to his children, invited him to flee from the

fever with them in his boat, which this gentleman gladly did.

Horror of horrors! the dreaded disease was however already lurking in good Mr. Fair's blood; and in less than a week it broke out on him with such violence, that, though Mr. Wyndham employed three physicians and waited on this isolated Englishman night and day, he died after three or four weeks of intense suffering, and was buried in the family grave-yard.

This was a severe trial to Musidora, who, in spite of all the watchings to keep the children from his room, had managed every now and then to slide in, and tell her dying friend how dearly she still loved him. Never did she forget the look of despair that this desolate stranger would cast on her, as he bade her "run away, for it would be her death to come near him."

Mrs. Wyndham, having no faith in God, had all her life been kept in bondage to the fear of death. As soon, therefore, as the wretched man appeared to be dying, she ran out of the house, carrying the two nurses, with her babes, and her step-daughters, to a distant neighbor's, where she remained till the funeral was over, and every article, bed, pillows, and all, belonging to the fatal chamber of Mr. Fair, were burnt up; and her husband had all the place fumigated with burning tar, and then painted and whitewashed.

None of the family, or any of the negroes, caught the pestilence, except Mr. Wyndham's son, Halcombe, who had been unwearied in his attention to the interesting stranger; sitting up with him at night with the affectionate anxiety of a brother. He, however, soon recovered, and Musidora, childlike, got so enchanted