The Countess of Seyton, previous to her first marriage, was Miss Clara Hayley, second daughter of the Reverend John Hayley, the rector of a parish in Devonshire.  She married, when only nineteen years of age, a Captain Gosford.  Her husband was ten years older than herself, and, as she discovered after marriage, was cursed with a morose and churlish temper and disposition.  Previous to her acquaintance with Gosford, she had been intimate with, almost betrothed to, Mr. Arthur Kingston, a young gentleman connected with the peerage, and at that time heir-apparent to the great expectancies and actual poverty of his father, Sir Arthur Kingston.  The haughty baronet, the instant he was made aware of the nature of his son’s intimacy with the rector’s daughter, packed the young man off to the continent on his travels.  The Reverend John Hayley and his beautiful Clara were as proud as the baronet, and extremely indignant that it should be thought either of them wished to entrap or delude Arthur Kingston into an unequal or ineligible marriage.  This feeling of pride and resentment aided the success of Mr. Gosford’s suit, and Clara Hayley, like many other rash, high-notioned young ladies, doomed herself to misery, in order to show the world, and Mr. Arthur Kingston and his proud father especially, that she had a spirit.  The union was a most unhappy one.  One child only, which died in its infancy, was born to them; and after being united somewhat more than two years, a separation, vehemently insisted on by the wife’s father, took place, and the unhappily-wedded daughter returned to her parent’s roof.  Mr. Gosford—­he had some time before sold out of the army—­traveled about the country in search of amusement, and latterly of health, (for his unhappy cankerous temper at last affected and broke down his never very robust physical constitution), accompanied for the twelvemonth preceding his death by a young man belonging to the medical profession, of the name of Chilton.  Mr. and Mrs. Gosford had been separated a few days less than three years when the husband died, at the village of Swords in Ireland, and not far distant from Dublin.  The intelligence was first conveyed to the widow by a paragraph in the “Freeman’s Journal,” a Dublin newspaper; and by the following post a letter arrived from Mr. Chilton, inclosing a ring which the deceased had requested should be sent to his wife, and a note, dictated just previous to his death-hour, in which he expressed regret for the past, and admitted that he alone had been to blame for the unhappy separation.  A copy of his will, made nearly a twelvemonth previously, was also forwarded, by which he bequeathed his property, amounting to about three hundred pounds per annum, to a distant relative then residing in New Holland.  By a memorandum of a subsequent date, Mr. Chilton was to have all the money and other personals he might die in actual possession of, after defraying the necessary funeral expenses.  This will, Mr. Chilton stated, the deceased gentleman had expressed a wish in his last moments to alter, but death had been too sudden for him to be able to give effect to that good, but too long-delayed intention.