The eldest (twelve years old) was kissing
his father's left hand, bathing it all the while with such big tears,
that dropped down so one by one, and so after the other!
Good boy, your sorrows have begun soon enough for your sensible heart!
Strengthen it by time with Christian courage, or else you will smother it
with grief, long before your hair has turned grey! There are too many
troubles to go through in this world. Take courage; there is a God,
and therefore learn by heart the Psalm, 'Beatus vir qui timet Dominum.'
My head has still the red hair of my youth, and yet I am a living witness
of many truths in that Psalm; meditate, therefore, especially on the last
verse, ending 'Desiderium peccatorum peribit.'
Had I in younger years cultivated painting, I feel satisfied that I could
produce now such a tableau as to match any of my countryman, Raffaelle;
so much an all-wise Providence has been pleased, perhaps for the trial of
my heart, to endow me with a cast of mind that, on similar occasions as
the solemn one above, whenever my electric fluid is called into action,
it is actually a daguerreotype.
Chapter LXXIII.
Amare Rimembranze.
At four o'clock on Tuesday morning, we were commanded to fall in, dressed
and hobbled as we were. Captain Thomas, with the tone and voice of a
country parson, read to us his 'Order of the day,' to the effect that we
were now under his charge for our transit to Melbourne; that if any of us
stirred a finger, or moved a lip--especially across the diggings--his
orders were that the transgressor should be shot on the spot.
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