" This is his maxim.
Our lives have been strangely happy and successful up to this hour, so
that sometimes my emotional nature, too often in extremes, trembles
beneath its burden of prosperity, and conjures up strange phantoms of
dark possibilities, that send me, tearful and depressed, to my husband's
arms, to find strength and courage in his rare and calm philosophy and
equipoise.
Never on his sweet serene brow have I seen a frown of discontent, or a
cloud of sourceless sorrow, such as too often come--the last especially
to mine--born of that melancholy which has its root far back in the
bosoms of my ancestors.
Such as his life is, he accepts it manfully; and in his shadow I find
protection and grow strong.
Reader, farewell!
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: EDITOR'S NOTE.-- ... Some years after the closing of Miriam
Monfort's Retrospect, the civil war broke out in the United States, and
Pope Pius IX. was pleased to grant permission to several American nuns,
Southern ladies, whose vocation was religious, to visit their own
States, and lend what succor, spiritual and physical, they could to the
wounded and dying, on the battle-fields and in the Confederate camps.
Among these came the Sister Ursula, from the convent of the Carthusians,
known once as Lavinia, or Bertie La Vigne. She was particularly fearless
and efficient, and was killed by a cannon-ball at Shiloh while kneeling
beside a dying officer, ascertained to be her sister's husband, the
gallant George Gaston of the Seventh-Georgia.
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