After all, I have found Lucy the most dear to me, and the most valuable companion, since we have both passed the age of fifty.  Air is not more transparent, than her pure mind, and I ever turn to it for counsel, sympathy, and support, with a confidence and reliance that experience could alone justify.  As we draw nearer to the close of life, I find my wife gradually loosening the ties of this world, her love for her husband and children excepted, and fastening her looks on a future world.  In thus accomplishing, with a truth and nature that are unerringly accurate, the great end of her being, nothing repulsive, nothing that is in the least tinctured with bigotry, and nothing that is even alienated from the affections, or her duties in life, is mingled with her devotion.  My family, like its female head, has ever been deeply impressed by religion; but it is religion in its most pleasing aspect; religion that has no taint of puritanism, and in which sin and innocent gaiety are never confounded It is the most cheerful family of my acquaintance; and this, I must implicitly believe, solely because, in addition to the bounties it enjoys, under the blessing of God, it draws the just distinction between those things that the word of God has prohibited, and those which come from the excited and exaggerated feelings of a class of theologians, who, constantly preaching the doctrine of faith, have regulated their moral discipline solely, as if, in their hearts, they placed all their reliance on the efficacy of a school of good works that has had its existence in their own diseased imaginations.  I feel the deepest gratitude to Lucy for having enstilled the most profound sense of their duties into our children, while they remain totally free from cant, and from those exaggerations and professions which so many mistake for piety of purer emanation.

Some of my readers may feel a curiosity to know how time has treated us elderly people, for elderly we have certainly become.  As for myself, I enjoy a green old age, and I believe look at least ten years younger than I am.  This, I attribute to temperance and exercise.  Lucy was positively an attractive woman until turned of fifty, retaining even a good deal of her bloom down to that period of life.  I think her handsome still; and old Neb, when in a flattering humour, is apt to speak of either of my daughters as his “handsome young missus,” and of my wife as his “handsome ole missus.”

And why should not Lucy Hardinge continue to retain many vestiges of those charms which rendered her so lovely in youth?  Ingenuous, pure of mind, sincere, truthful, placid and just, the soul could scarcely fail to communicate some of its blessed properties to that countenance which even now so sensitively reflects its best impulses.  I repeat, Lucy is still handsome, and in my eyes even her charming daughters are less fair.  That she has so long been, and is still my wife, forms not only the delight but the pride of my life.  It is a blessing, for which, I am not ashamed to say, I daily render thanks to God, on my knees.