About this period they expected a letter from their daughter; and on the morning in question their father had dispatched one of his boys to the post-office, with a hope of receiving it.  The male portion of the family were the younger, with the exception of the eldest son, who was their third child.  Their position was as follows:  the old man sat at the end of a plain table, with his bible open before him—­for they had just concluded prayer:  his wife, a younger-looking woman, and faded more by affliction than by age, sat beside him, holding on her breast their third daughter—­she who had been once the star of their hearth, and who reclined there in mute sorrow, her pale cheek and wasted hands giving those fatal indications of consumption in its last stage, which so severely tries the heart of parent or relative to witness.  The other two girls sat opposite, one of them in tears, turning her heart-broken look now upon the countenance of her father and again upon that of her gentle, but almost dying sister, whilst her companion endeavored to soothe her little brother, who was crying for food; for the simple fact was, that they had not yet breakfasted, nor were the means of providing a breakfast under their roof.  Their sole hope for that, as well as for more enlarged relief, depended upon the letter which they expected from their eldest daughter.

It is scarcely necessary to say that they all looked pale, sickly, and emaciated with suffering, and want of’ the comfortable necessaries of life.  Their dress was decent, of course, but such as they never expected to have been forced to wear so long.  The crying boy was barefooted, and the young creature who endeavored to console him had thin and worn slippers on her tender feet, and her snowy skin was in more than one place visible through the rents of her frock.  The old man looked at them, from time to time; and there might have been observed, notwithstanding the sweetness and placidity of his smile, a secret expression of inward agony—­the physical and natural feelings of the parent and the man mingling, or rather struggling, with the great principle of dependence on God, without which he must at once have sunk down prostrate and hopeless.

“When,” said the boy, “will Edward come from the post-office?  Is there nothing at all in the house, mamma, that I could eat?”

“Hush!  Frank,” said his sister; “where’s your generosity and your patience?  Did we not all promise to think of papa and mamma before ourselves—­yes, and of our poor Maria, too, who is so ill?”

“That is true,” replied the boy, “but when I promised that, I wasn’t so hungry as I am now.  But, still, if I had anything to eat, I would give the best part of it to papa or mamma, or Maria, if she could eat it—­that is, after I had taken one mouthful for myself.  Oh will Ned never come from the post-office?”