“Mr. Allen looks feeble, Sarah,” said Mrs. Eldon to her sister, some time after her marriage—“Is he well?”

“Yes, perfectly,” replied Sarah. “Pray don’t put it into his head that he is not, or you will make him more indolent than ever. He wants exercise, that is all. I wish him to ride on horseback before breakfast.”

“At what hour do you breakfast?” inquired Mrs. Eldon.

“At six,” replied her sister.

“At six at this season!” exclaimed Mrs. Eldon. “Why it can scarcely be light. Does Mr. Allen like such early hours?”

“No,” answered Mrs. Allen, laughing, “he would greatly prefer nine, I believe. But such indolent habits destroy all order and regularity in a household.”

“Now, Mrs. Eldon, I appeal to you,” said her brother-in-law, good-humoredly, “if there is any use in being up at candle-light. I tell Sarah we have the twenty-four hours before us. I do not see the use of hurrying so. It appears to me I hardly get asleep before the bell rings for breakfast.”

“The use of early rising,” replied Sarah, “is that we need never hurry. There is time for every thing, and unless the master and mistress are up, every thing stands still. And, after all, it only depends upon habit whether we dislike it or not;” and there was something in her tone and manner that implied it was a habit her husband must acquire.

Now in fact Mr. Allen was not strong; but Sarah, who had never been ill for an hour, and scarcely knew what it was to be fatigued, had no more comprehension of the languor of a feeble frame, than she had mercy for a weak mind, and, consequently, the breakfast bell rang as pitilessly at break of day, as if Mr. Allen had been endowed with her own “steel and whalebone constitution.” Strong health makes one sometimes unfeeling, and so it was with Sarah. She thought a good walk or long ride a panacea for all the ills flesh is heir to, and that if sickness was not sin, it was what she considered next to it—laziness.

“And now, Sarah,” said Mrs. Eldon, “I want a favor of you. I want you to ask young Brandon and his wife to your party next week.”

“Which one?” inquired Mrs. Allen. “I did not know Frank was married, for I don’t suppose you mean the other.”

“Yes I do,” replied her sister.

“Not the one who was implicated in that affair some years since?” pursued Mrs. Allen.

“The same,” continued Mrs. Eldon. “He was almost a boy when that happened, and he has quite redeemed himself since. And now that he is married, his friends wish to make an effort to bring him forward again; and I promised to ask you to invite him. It will be of service to him to be seen here.”

“Never!” said Sarah, with decision; “I never will countenance any one who could be guilty of such conduct. I am astonished you could ask it.”

“My dear Sarah, remember what a lad he was at the time,” urged Mrs. Eldon.

“He was old enough to know better,” replied Mrs. Allen.

“Undoubtedly,” resumed her sister—“but, Sarah, if you had a family of boys growing up around you, as I have, you would learn to look with more leniency upon their errors.”

“If I countenance such young men as Brandon,” replied Sarah, “I don’t know what right I should have to look for better things in my own sons. When society overlooks such acts, we may as well abandon all principle and order at once.”

“As a general rule, I agree with you,” returned Mrs. Eldon; “but situated as we are with regard to the Brandon family, I should wish here to make an exception. They were my mother’s earliest friends, and we are under many obligations to them.”

“Any thing that I could do for them but this, I would do cheerfully,” replied Sarah.

“But there is nothing else you can do, Sarah,” persisted Mrs. Eldon. “They want nothing else; and it seems to me that friendship is but a name, if we are not willing to make a sacrifice for our friends.”

“Any but that of principle I am willing to make for them,” replied Mrs. Allen, resolutely.

When Sarah took it up as a matter of principle, her sister desisted at once, as she knew the business to be hopeless. She only sighed, and hoped Sarah might never know some of the trials of a mother’s heart, to teach her mercy and compassion.

Sarah continued, as a married woman, to be very much what she had been as a girl, for marriage does not modify the character as much as people think it does. Her active and energetic nature, which had formerly been expended on societies and paupers, was now devoted to her household, husband and children, and all were managed with the same upright principle and relentless decision which she had ever shown in all her undertakings.

The attachment between herself and husband was strong, although the perfect harmony did not always exist between them that might have been expected, from the sense on her side and the good temper on his.

Mr. Allen, like most weak men, was obstinate, and when he wanted to do a thing, generally did it, and only showed his consciousness of Sarah’s disapprobation by not telling her of what he had done; and many a time was she bitterly provoked to find that projects which she had opposed, and supposed abandoned, had long since been quietly effected. Her heart was often in a “lime kiln,” though perhaps about trifles. Yet upon the whole she enjoyed as much of happiness, probably, as her nature was capable of. Her children were pattern children, orderly, correct and obedient. No act of rebellion had ever been known in the little circle, but one, and that was in her eldest boy, which had been so severely punished that it had become a matter of fearful tradition with the rest. In fact, Sarah was a stern mother, more feared than loved by her children, yet they were generally looked upon as a “remarkably well brought up family,” and Mrs. Allen received no small praise for her admirable management of her young flock.

“Who do you think was suspended to-day?” said Charles Eldon, as he threw down his books on his return from college.

“Who? who?” exclaimed his young brothers and sisters.

“Tom Allen!”

“What, Tommy good-shoes!” exclaimed the children, with shouts of merriment. “Oh, that is too good! Mamma, only think, Tom Allen is suspended!”

“Hush, hush, my dear!” said Mrs. Eldon, gravely, “I am sorry to hear it.”

“That is more than I am,” said Fanny, in a low voice. “It is the best news I have heard this many a day. Aunt Sarah made such a fuss when Lewis got into that scrape, and it was not much after all.”

“What has been the matter, my son?” inquired Mrs. Eldon.

“Nothing of much consequence—only Tom has lagged behind the class almost ever since he has been in it, so now the Puts have suspended him, and he must take a tutor, and try and pull up.”

“To think of one of those pattern children being suspended!” said Frank, laughing. “It is the best joke I ever heard.”

And in spite of all their mother’s proper admonitions and grave looks, the news was matter of perfect jubilee with the young Eldons. Not that they had positively unkind feelings toward their young cousins, but they disliked their aunt heartily, and, in short, pattern children always incur a certain share of unpopularity among juveniles of their own standing. Free and spirited natures will not brook the superiority which is often accorded by their elders to the tame and correct inferiority of such children. Then, too, the sins of the parents are often visited heavily on their offspring under similar circumstances; and “Aunt Sarah’s lectures,” and “the fuss Aunt Sarah made on such and such an occasion,” “and now Aunt Sarah need not make big eyes at Charley any more,” and “let Aunt Allen shut up about Lewis now,” and many more such reminiscences and ejaculations of the kind, broke forth on all sides. In fact, if the whole truth were known, Mrs. Eldon herself, in spite of her efforts to maintain the proprieties, did not feel, at the bottom of her heart, the sorrow for her sister’s mortification she assumed. “It will do her good,” she said to herself. “Sarah is too hard upon other people’s children. The thing is not a matter of importance in itself, but it is enough to show her that her boys are like other boys.”

“I thought your sister was wrong when she insisted upon that boy’s taking a collegiate education,” remarked Mr. Eldon. “He resembles his father in mind: that is to say, he has none, and besides, is naturally indolent. He showed a disposition to enter the counting-house, and he would have done better there.”

“Sarah thinks it great weakness in parents to yield to what she calls the whims of young people.”

“Undoubtedly; but, at the same time, not to study and make allowances for their natural capacities and dispositions, is equally unwise. Nature is to be guided, but not controlled.”

“You would find it difficult to persuade Sarah that she could not control all events falling within the sphere of her domestic circle,” replied Mrs. Eldon.

“Then probably she has a bitter lesson yet to learn,” replied Mr. Eldon—and so the conversation dropped.

The summer coming on, Mrs. Eldon left the city early with her family, and consequently did not see Mrs. Allen for several months. When she did, she was much struck with the change in her appearance.

“Are you well, Sarah?” she asked.

“No, I am not,” replied Mrs. Allen. “I have heard people talk of being weak and miserable, but I never knew what they meant before. I saw they were not really ill, and I thought it was only imagination or indolence. I now feel that I was wrong. For the first time in my life, I know what it is to be oppressed with languor. Every thing is a burden to me; and when I try to rouse myself and shake it off, my limbs refuse to obey my will.”

“My dear sister,” said Mrs. Eldon, “don’t attempt that. You need repose—If you overtask yourself now, you may feel the ill effects all your life.”

“That is what my dear, kind husband says,” replied Mrs. Allen. “And oh,” she continued, with much emotion, “you don’t know, Charlotte, how my conscience reproaches me for my former want of consideration—for my unkindness, in fact, to him. You always told me he was not strong, but I thought it was only one of your notions, and I laughed at his dislike of early rising, and had, in short, no sympathy for much that I now am convinced was bodily indisposition. Formerly, I could not comprehend what possible good it could do him, even supposing, according to you, that he was not well, to rise an hour later in the morning. The idea seemed to me absolutely absurd. And now when I wake so languid, I feel that an hour’s rest is of such infinite importance, and I ask myself, ‘Where is the use in getting up?—what matters it whether the household commences its daily routine an hour earlier or later?’ Charlotte, I sometimes feel that this breaking down of my health is sent as a punishment, and a lesson to teach me sympathy and mercy for those of a naturally different constitution from my own.”

When Mrs. Eldon repeated this observation of Mrs. Allen’s to her husband, he dryly remarked that, “it was a pity the lesson had not come earlier.”

Pecuniary losses, too, fell heavily upon the Allens about this time. A public institution failed, in which Mr. Allen had invested much of his wife’s property. It had never been an institution in which she had much confidence, and when he had consulted her on the subject, she decidedly objected to the changing certain for what she considered uncertain property. But Mr. Allen, as we have said, was a weak man, who, when he had once got a notion in his head, never rested until he had executed it. He was just sufficiently under his wife’s influence to make him conceal the fact when it was done. If circumstances discovered it, he would only reply to her remonstrances, which were not always of the gentlest, “Well, well, it is done now, and there is no use in talking about it.” Sarah was not often to be pacified in that way, and if any thing could have provoked her more than the facts themselves, it would have been the quiet, meek, yet obstinate air withal, with which he listened to her lectures on the subject.

Either Sarah was not the woman she once had been, or the magnitude of the present offence seemed to stun her into silence, for she bore with dignity and fortitude what she felt to be a serious misfortune.

What was grief to her, was matter of gossip, however, to the circle of her immediate acquaintance, and that, too, not always in the most sympathizing and good-natured spirit.

“Are you not sorry for the Allens?” inquired one of her set. “It is said they have lost the greater part of their fortune in this company that has just failed.”

The lady thus addressed was one who prided herself on her frankness, and she answered, with a spirit and promptness that caused the other to laugh,

“No, I can’t say I am. Mrs. Allen has hitherto thought that every body else’s misfortunes were their faults. Let her now bring the matter home.”

The other seemed to enjoy the remark, although hardly daring to say as much herself, and she only replied, with an affectation of amiability that her gratified looks denied—

“But it is a hard lesson to learn.”

“My dear Mrs. Binney,” replied her friend, “we have all of us hard lessons to learn in our experience through life. But I have no sympathy for those who need them before they can feel for others.”

“She certainly has been rather hard upon those who fell into misfortune,” gently resumed Mrs. Binney.

“Rather hard!” ejaculated the other—“I never shall forget when my brother failed—” and then came a stored up host of bitter remembrances and old offences against Mrs. Allen, speeches long forgotten, that had rankled deep, to rise up in judgment when her turn came to call for public sympathy and general discussion.

Mr. Allen seemed to escape without either sympathy or animadversion. If alluded to, he was called “a poor, weak fool,” by the men, and “oh, he is nobody,” was all the consideration deigned him by the women. But Mrs. Allen was canvassed and talked over according to the feelings of the speakers, as if she were both master and mistress of the establishment. Mrs. Ludlow, her early friend, was still her friend, and sympathized, from the bottom of her heart, in all her trials.

Prosperity often seems to mark certain families for its own for years—but when the tide changes, misfortune frequently clings as obstinately to those who have hitherto seemed the favorites of fortune. To most of us, life is as an April day, checkered by clouds and sunshine; but there are others whose brilliant morning and calm noonday suddenly darken into clouds and storm. A certain portion of sorrow is the lot of all, whether it comes drifting through life, or is compassed within any particular period of existence. Come, however, it must to all.

Sarah’s life had hitherto been blessed above that of most women. But youth, health and wealth had now passed from her, and her proud, stern spirit had yet to undergo trials she had never dreamed within the scope of possibility as falling to her lot. Her eldest boy, the “Tommy good-shoes” of former days, was now the source of an anguish a mother’s heart alone can know. Forced upon a course of education for which he had no taste and scarcely any capacity, the four years allotted to collegiate studies were to him four years of unbroken idleness. The same easy, docile nature that had made him the “Tommy good-child” of early years, rendered him still pliant to the influences about him. These, unhappily, as is generally the case in idleness, were not good. College suspensions and remonstrances were the commencement of a course of which little bills soon followed in the wake. When these fell into his father’s hands, they were often paid without a word, for he had learned to dread, scarce less than the boy, the bitterness of his wife’s indignation when they reached her knowledge.

To his mother’s keen reproaches, Tom listened in silence, the same kind of frightened, meek, obstinate silence with which his father had endured many a harangue before him. But they did not mend his ways.

Mrs. Eldon had heard from time to time rumors that “Tom Allen was very wild,” but she had thought that “boys will be boys,” and her husband said “young men will be young men,” and thus they had both attributed the rumors they had heard to the indiscretions of a youthful spirit. But here they were mistaken. Tom’s were not the errors of a youthful but of a weak nature. The influence abroad was bad, and the conduct at home injudicious. If Mr. Allen’s children did not exactly say with the world, “Oh! he is nobody,” they yet felt the fact; while their mother was to them “the everybody” they feared and looked up to. Consequently, if Tom got into a scrape there was nothing he so much dreaded as his mother’s hearing of it. There was scarcely any public opprobrium he would not rather have endured than her anger. In fact, the sort of Coventry in which he was put, the sad, severe looks that were bestowed upon him at home were slight inducements to a weak and timid spirit to reveal difficulties, pour forth confession and implore relief, and thus what had begun in weakness ended in disgrace.

A debt which, though not large in itself, yet of considerable magnitude in the eyes of a youth, had been contracted almost unconsciously, and which he had not courage to avow at home. Harassed, tormented, terrified, he made use of funds which were not his own, and which his situation in a counting-house, where he had at last been placed, put within his reach. Weak, timid and reserved, he neither revealed his situation, nor asked for aid from either his young companions or natural friends—but when he found detection could no longer be warded off—fled.

Public disgrace was the consequence; and the insignificance of the sum and the magnitude of the offence were alike the theme of general discussion. Mingled commiseration and blame were bestowed upon the unhappy parents. People generally love to think that a faulty education is the root of the evil. Some, therefore, censured the system that had restricted him in means; others thought a too ample allowance had been the origin of the sin.

The affair was canvassed in every possible spirit, and though commiseration could not be refused to the heart-stricken parents, yet the tone of it was often qualified by the personal sentiments of the speakers, for it is wondrous how unpopularity will cling to those who have incurred it, even under calamities which one would suppose were enough to bury all old griefs.

“I cannot but feel sorry for any mother under such circumstances,” had been said, “but I feel as little for Mrs. Allen as I could feel for any one so situated. She meets with more sympathy now than she ever would have given to another.”

“Had it been any one else’s son but Sarah Allen’s,” exclaimed another, “I should have been sorry indeed. But hers is a hard temper. Now, however, she knows what trials are.”

“I am sorry for any one so situated, but if such things will happen, I had rather it had fallen on Mrs. Allen than on any one else I know.”

The Brandons breathed a deeper but silent comment upon the blow that had fallen on the haughty and unfeeling woman whose early slight they never had forgiven.

“My early, only friend,” cried Mrs. Allen, as she threw herself into Mary Ludlow’s arms, who, ever true to her in sorrow as in joy, was with her now in her hour of bitterest anguish, “you, you alone feel for one who did not feel for others. The heart that was hardened by prosperity deserved to be broken by sorrow.” And then the full tide of anguish, and repentance, and confession, gushed forth with a freedom and humility that wells up alone from a broken and a contrite heart.

The stern lesson had been taught, and received in a spirit that shows that where there is Sense, experience must teach Sympathy. The rock had been smitten, and the waters that gushed forth were pure and regenerating.

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BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

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BY MRS. E. J. EAMES.

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BY MRS. J. C. CAMPBELL.

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