How strange is life, and how mysteriously connected is the woe or the weal of a single family with the great mass of human society!  We beg the reader to stand with us upon a low, sloping hill, a little to the left of Fardorougha’s house, and, after having solemnized his heart by a glance at the starry gospel of the skies, to cast his eye upon the long, white-washed dwelling, as it shines faintly in the visionary distance of a moonlight night.  How full of tranquil beauty is the hour, and how deep the silence, except when it is broken by the loud baying of the watch-dog, as he barks in sullen fierceness at his own echo!  Or perhaps there is nothing heard but the sugh of the mountain river, as with booming sound it rises and falls in the distance, filling the ear of midnight with its wild and continuous melody.  Look around, and observe the spirit of repose which sleeps on the face of nature; think upon the dream of human life, and of all the inexplicable wonders which are read from day to day in that miraculous page—­the heart of man.  Neither your eye nor imagination need pass beyond that humble roof before you, in which it is easy to perceive, by the lights passing at this unusual hour across the windows, that there is something added either to their joy or to their sorrow.  There is the mother, in whose heart was accumulated the unwasted tenderness of years, forgetting all the past in the first intoxicating influence of an unknown ecstasy, and looking to the future with the eager aspirations of affection.  There is the husband, too, for whose heart the lank devil of the avaricious—­the famine-struck god of the miser—­is even now contending with the almost extinguished love which springs up in a father’s bosom on the sight of his first-born.

Reader, who can tell whether the entrancing visions of the happy mother, or the gloomy anticipations of her apprehensive husband, are most prophetic of the destiny which is before their child.  Many indeed and various are the hopes and fears felt under that roof, and deeply will their lights and shadows be blended in the life of the being whose claims are so strong upon their love.  There, for some time past the lights in the window have appeared less frequently—­one by one we presume the inmates have gone to repose—­no other is now visible—­the last candle is extinguished, and this humble section of the great family of man is now at rest with the veil of a dark and fearful future unlifted before them.

There is not perhaps in the series of human passions any one so difficult to be eradicated out of the bosom as avarice, no matter with what seeming moderation it puts itself forth, or under what disguise it may appear.  And among all its cold-blooded characteristics there is none so utterly unaccountable as that frightful dread of famine and ultimate starvation, which is also strong in proportion to the impossibility of its ever being realized.  Indeed, when it arrives to this we should not term it a passion, but a malady, and in our opinion the narrow-hearted patient should be prudently separated from society, and treated as one laboring under an incurable species of monomania.