The rest of the time spent by Armstrong on the island, was passed in
conversation of very much the same description. It would seem from his
self-reproaches and confessions, that during the lives of his wife and
son, the melancholy death of his brother had made no great impression
upon him. Happy in a woman he adored, and who returned his affection;
with a blooming family around him; immersed in thoughts of business;
and in the enjoyment of a large fortune, there seemed nothing wanting
to complete his felicity. He remembered, too, that there had been an
instance of insanity in his family, some years before the birth of
himself, which had terminated fatally, the cause of which could not
be traced, and felt disposed, therefore, with the natural tendency to
self-exculpation of the happy, to find the reason for the tragical end
of his brother in hereditary infirmity, rather than attach any serious
blame to himself for securing the affections of a lady, whom he
was assured had never loved another. But when after a few years of
unclouded bliss, first his wife, and then his son, was taken away, all
things assumed an altered aspect. He found himself the last male of
his family, his name about to become extinct and forgotten, with only
one other being in the world in whose veins ran his blood, and for
whose life his paternal solicitude almost daily trembled. His mind
brooded day by day more and more over his misfortunes, which gradually
began to wear the form of judgments, the object and result of which
must be to erase his hated name from the earth. As Faith grew up, his
anxieties on her account diminished, but that only left him the
wider scope to dwell upon wild imaginations and make himself more the
subject of his thoughts. Of a grave and reflective cast of mind, he
had even from his early years respected the duties of religion, and
now he turned to it for consolation. But the very sources whence he
should have derived comfort and peace were fountains of disquiet. His