This woman had a brother, who also lived in the same neighborhood, and who, although so closely related to her by blood, was, nevertheless, as different from her in both character and temper as good could be from evil.  He was wealthy and generous, free from everything like a worldly spirit, and a warm but unostentatious benefactor to the poor, and to such individuals as upon inquiry he found to be entitled to his beneficence.  His wife had, some years before, died of decline, which, it seems, was hereditary in her family.  He felt her death as a calamity which depressed his heart to the uttermost depths of affliction, and from which, indeed, he never recovered.  All that remained to him after her demise was a beautiful little girl, around whom his affections gathered with a degree of tenderness that was rendered almost painful by the apprehension of her loss.  Agnes, from her eighth or ninth year, began to manifest slight symptoms of the same fatal malady which had carried away her mother.  These attacks filled his heart with those fearful forebodings, which, whilst they threw him into a state of terror and alarm, at the same time rendered the love he bore her such as may be imagined, but cannot be expressed.  It is only when we feel the probability of losing a beloved object that the heart awakens to a more exquisite perception of its affections for it, and wonders, when the painful symptoms of disease appear, why it was heretofore unconscious of the full extent of its love.  Such was the nature of Mr. Hamilton’s feelings for his daughter, whenever the short cough or hectic cheek happened to make their appearance from time to time, and foreshadow, as it were, the certainty of an early death; and then he should be childless—­a lonely man in the world, possessing a heart overflowing with affection, and yet without an object on which he could lavish it, as now, with happiness and delight.  He looked, therefore, upon decline as upon an approaching foe, and the father’s heart became sentinel for the welfare of his child, and watched every symptom of the dreaded disease that threatened her, with a vigilance that never slept.  Under such circumstances we need not again assure our readers that his parental tenderness for this beautiful girl—­now his “only one,” as he used to call her—­was such as is rare even in the most affectionate families; but in this case the slight and doubtful tenure which his apprehensions told him he had of her existence raised his love of her almost to idolatry.  Still she improved in person, grace, and intellect; and although an occasional shadow, as transient as that which passes over and makes dim the flowery fields of May or April, darkened her father’s heart for a time, yet it passed away, and she danced on in the light of youthful happiness, without a single trace of anxiety or care.  Her father’s affection for her was not, however, confined to herself; on the contrary, it passed to and embraced every object that was dear to her—­her favorite books,