“And then I tell ye, my heart fluttered about in my bosom with joy.
“‘Oh, love ’tis a killin’ thing;
Did you ever feel the pang?’
“So the old gentleman takes out a bottle of old wine from the sideboard, and I takes a glass with him, and goes back to Solena. When I comes in, she looks up with a smile and says, ‘What luck?’ I says, ‘Good luck.’ I shall win the prize if nothin’ happens! and now Solena you must go in tu, and you had better go in while the broth is hot. So she goes in, pretty soon she comes trippin’ along back, and sets down in my lap, and I says, ‘what luck?’ and she says ‘good.’ So we sot the bridal day, and fixed on the weddin’ dresses, and so we got all fixin’s ready and even the Domine was spoke for. And one Sabba-day arter meetin,’ I goes home and dines with the family, and arter dinner we walked out over Schuylkill bridge, and at evenin’ we went to a gentleman’s where she had been a good deal acquain’ted; and there was quite a company on us, and we carried on pretty brisk. She was naturally a high-lived thing, and full of glee; and she got as wild as a hawk, and she wrestled and scuffled as gals do, and got all tired out, and she come and sets down in my lap and looks at me, and says, ‘Peter help me;’ and I put my hand round her and asked her what was the matter, and she fetched a sigh, and groan, and fell back and died in my arms!!! A physician come in, and says he, ‘she’s dead and without help, for she has burst a blood-vessel in her breast.’ And there she lay cold and lifeless, and I thought I should go crazy.
“She was carried home and laid out, and the second day she was buried, and I didn’t sleep a wink till she was laid in the grave; and oh! when we come to lower her coffin down in the grave, and the cold clods of the valley begun to fall on her breast, I felt that my heart was in the coffin, and I wished I could die and lay down by her side.
“For weeks and months arter her death, I felt that I should go ravin’ distracted. I couldn’t realize that she was dead; oh! Sir, the world looked jist like a great dreadful prison to me. I stayed at her father’s, and for weeks I used to go once or twice a day to her tomb, and weep, and stay, and linger round, and the spot seemed sacred where she rested.
“Well, I stayed in Philadelphia some months arter this, and I tell ye I felt as though my all was gone. I stood alone in the world, as desolate as could be, and I determined I never would agin try to git me a wife. It seemed to me I was jist like some old wreck, I’d seen on the shore.
A. “Peter, you make me think of Walter Scott’s description of Rhoderic Dhu, in his ‘Lady of the Lake.’
“‘As some tall ship, whose lofty prore,
Shall never stem the billows more,