Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/421

Rh thin, which I was not surprised at. She told me Lady Anne (Dawson) was at Harrowgate and surprisingly well in health; that her attendance on her daughter had been continual, and her sorrow for her of the tenderest, most permanent and reasonable kind, restrained merely by the submission she pays to the power and will of that Supreme Being, whose beneficence had granted her, for eleven years, the most promising of children. I think it right to posterity, if this Diary should by any means descend to them, to relate the most remarkable of many acts of resolution that her sincere piety enabled her to perform, as an example of how parental tenderness ought to operate on such trials, and as a proof that the Divine support can do all things even in a mind torn by grief and a body worn by sickness. In the last visit the physician made her daughter, she followed him out to ask his opinion of her state. He told her that she could not live twelve hours. She then asked him if he expected any struggle before her death. He answered she was so weak he thought she would go off in faintings. Having heard this she returned into the room, and summoning all her courage said to the child,—"My dear Henrietta, I have been asking your physician how soon he thinks you will be well, for you have been so long ill we may expect it now every day. He assures me before this time to-morrow; but as all severe illnesses have their crises, you must expect first to be extremely sick and faint, and at last to be quite overcome with sleep, which you have been so long without, that it will be the soundest you have ever had, and when you wake you will be stronger, lighter, and better than you ever remember to have been." The child, who was perfectly sensible, seemed pleased, and asked her how she could know that. To which Lady Anne answered that the course of most illnesses were well known, and that she herself always knew that it would be so in this, as it was one many people had had, but as she did not know the exact time of the crisis, would not talk of it to her for fear of making her impatient. In an hour or two the child called her and complained of extreme faintness, upon which she took her