The heart, however--or to come nearer the truth--the reason of the mother--that loving mother--could not bear the blow that deprived her of her innocent boy--her pride, her only one.

In about a week after his interment she proceeded one morning to his grave, bearing with her the breakfast which the poor youth had been accustomed to take.

This, in fact, became her daily habit, and here she usually sat for hours, until in most cases her woe-stricken husband, on missing her, was obliged, by some pardonable fiction, to lure her home under the expectation of seeing him.

This continued during spring, summer, autumn, and the greater portion of winter--up in fact until the preceding night.

She had, some time during the course of that night, escaped from her poor, husband while he slept, and having entered the grave-yard by stone steps that were in a part of the wall--for a passage went through it--she reached her boy's grave, where it was supposed, after having for some time, probably until lassitude and sorrow, and a frame worn down by her peculiar calamity, had induced sleep--she was found dead in the course of the morning--an afflicting but beautiful instance of that undying love of a mother's heart, which survives the wreck of all the other faculties that compose her being.
Her miserable husband and friends were then bearing her body home, in order that it might be waked decently and with due respect, ere it should mingle with the ashes of him whom she had loved so well.