6 TERENCE.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
AN EARLY BEREAVEMENT. TRUE LOVE ITS OWN COMFORTER. A LONELY FATHER AND AN ONLY CHILD.
Read ye that run the aweful truth,
With which I charge my page;
A worm is in the bud of youth,
And at the root of age.
COWPER.
Leonard was not more than eight and twenty when he obtained a living, a few miles from Doncaster. He took his bride with him to the vicarage. The house was as humble as the benefice, which was worth less than £50. a year; but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the country round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone. A few acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden was large enough to afford healthful and pleasurable employment to its owners. The course of true love never ran more smoothly; but its course was short.
O how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!1
Little more than five years from the time of their marriage had elapsed, before a headstone in the adjacent churchyard told where the remains of Margaret Bacon had been deposited in the 30th year of her age.