Do not therefore pride yourselves on the great fortunes you are likely to possess: I have received no other satisfaction in mine, than what arose from the benefits I have conferred on others.
By such lessons as these, did this tender parent endeavour to fortify their young minds against the vicissitudes of fortune, and to teach them not to place their confidence in riches.
She dwelt so often upon this theme, that she seemed to have a presentiment of those evils, which were now ready to pour in like a torrent upon her.
Gracious Heaven! how inscrutable are thy ways! Her affluent fortune, the very circumstance which seemed to promise her, in the eve of life, some compensation for the miseries she had endured in her early days, now proved the source of new and dreadful calamities to her, which, by involving the unhappy daughters of an unhappy mother in scenes of the most exquisite distress, cut off from her even the last resource of hope in this life, and rendered the close of her history still more....
Here the lady’s narrative breaks off, and the editor, not having it in his power, after the most diligent enquiry, to recover any more of the manuscript, is, to his great mortification, compelled to offer this fragment.
The END of the Third Volume.
Transcriber’s Notes
Spelling varies and is, generally, retained. However, there were a number of errors which involved transposition of characters, as well as missing or redundant characters which were most likely made by the printer. These have been checked against a contemporary edition, and corrected where necessary. The phrase ‘to bed’ is frequently, though not always, hyphenated as ‘to-bed’.
Proper names are frequently elided with a dash, of varying lengths. All have been rendered as ‘——’ (e.g. V——’s).