Ere many years the fragment which came into his possession dwindled into a fraction of its former value, and he found himself With a wife and four children—­two sons and two daughters—­struggling on a pittance of two hundred a year.  This, to a man possessing the feelings and education of a gentleman, amounted to something like retributive justice upon his prodigality.  His conflict with poverty, however, (for to him it might be termed such,) was fortunately not of long duration.  A younger brother who, finding that he must fight his own battle in life, had embraced the profession of medicine, very seasonably died, and Osborne’s father succeeded to a sum of twelve thousand pounds in the funds, and an income in landed property of seven hundred per annum.  He now felt himself more independent than he had ever been, and with this advantage, that his bitter experience of a heartless world had completely cured him of all tendency to extravagance.  And now he would have enjoyed as much happiness as is the usual lot of man, were it not that the shadow of death fell upon his house, and cast its cold blight upon his children.  Ere three years had elapsed he saw his eldest daughter fade out of life, and in less than two more his eldest son was laid beside her in the same grave.  Decline, the poetry of death, in its deadly beauty came upon them, and whilst it sang its song of life and hope to their hearts, treacherously withdrew them to darkness and the worm.

Osborne’s feelings were those of thoughtlessness and extravagance; but he had never been either a libertine or a profligate, although the world forbore not, when it found him humbled in his poverty, to bring such charges against him.  In truth, he was full of kindness, and no parent ever loved his children with deeper or more devoted affection.  The death of his noble son and beautiful girl brought down his spirit to the most mournful depths of affliction.  Still he had two left, and, as it happened, the most beautiful, and more than equally possessed his affections.  To them was gradually transferred that melancholy love which the heart of the sorrowing father had carried into the grave of the departed; and alas, it appeared as if it had come back to those who lived loaded with the malady of the dead.  The health of the surviving boy became delicate, and by the advice of his physician, who pronounced the air in which they lived unfavorable,—­Osborne, on hearing that Mr. Williams, a distant relation, was about to dispose of his house and grounds, immediately became the purchaser.  The situation, which had a southern aspect, was dry and healthy, the air pure and genial, and, according to the best medical opinions, highly beneficial to persons of a consumptive habit.

For two years before this—­that is since his brother’s death—­the health of young Osborne had been watched with all the tender vigilance of affection.  A regimen in diet, study and exercise, had been prescribed for him by his physician; the regulations of which he was by no means to transgress.