"As soon as they were able, they proceeded to Montreal, in company with the survivors of the wreck, and Donald showed the certificate of his appointment as surveyor--which he fortunately carried in his vest-pocket--to the mayor of the city, who provided comfortable quarters for them, and advised him to remain there until he should receive remittances from Scotland, for which they sent immediately after their arrival in Montreal.
"They had not yet decided whether they would return when these funds should arrive, or go on to the place for which they had started, as their companions were anxious to have them do.
"She expressed entire indifference as to going on or returning; her children being gone, she did not care where she was. The terrified, imploring look of her darling Maggie, as she was dashed from them on her frail support, amid the merciless buffetings and boiling surges of the furious waves--her eyes straining to catch a glimpse of them, and her dear little arms extended so pitifully to them for protection--haunted the imagination of the broken-hearted mother, and, she assured me, had not been absent from her thoughts one moment since, sleeping or waking.
"My sincere and fervent sympathy seemed to afford her some comfort, and it was freely and heartily offered; for I was myself, as I have hinted, at that time a mourner over the recent loss of the kindest and best of fathers, whose only daughter and cherished pet I had ever been. His death, when I was yet but a child in years, was followed by severe pecuniary reverses, which had driven us from our home and involved our hitherto affluent and most happy family in difficulties and poverty. In my ignorance of sorrow and of the religion which alone can sustain the afflicted, I had thought there could be none so unhappy and unfortunate as ourselves. I could not then believe the truth of the assurance, which was the solace of my invalid mother, that 'The Lord loveth whom he chasteneth.' I could not see the tender mercy and love that had inflicted this cruel bereavement and surrounded our helpless family with such calamities, in the clear light with which his grace afterward made it manifest to me.
"But here was an instance far more inscrutable and heart-rending. Strangers in a strange land; the broad Atlantic rolling between them and every heart upon which they had any special claim for sympathy; their children relentlessly torn from them; and all their worldly substance buried in the consuming deep! Why had they thus been singled out as marks for such a shower of fatal arrows? I pondered much upon it, and my eyes were opened to see the mercies that had been mingled with the chastisements of a loving Father in our own case. We had numerous and kind friends, whose sympathy had poured balm upon our wounded spirits, and whose generous hands had been opened to aid us in our necessities. Of these, the dear friends with whom I was then staying had been among the first, and their assistance and advice at that dark period of my life have ever been remembered with gratitude.
