Page:Memoirs of a Huguenot Family.djvu/458

 450 hoped to escape from France, but it was more difficult to accomplish now that he had publicly abjured the Protestant faith. In the course of two or three years, however, he succeeded in getting away, but he left behind him a daughter eighteen years of age, for the sole purpose of trying to collect, and turn into money, their few scattered resources, to bring after him to England. She was able to accomplish this end, and to join him in about a year; which I think was more than he had a right to expect: but we shall see that his family were not much enriched eventually.

Observe; the memoir he wrote for his children has been preserved and published: but how? His descendants could not read the manuscript, for it was in the French language, and they, like ourselves, had become blended with another nation. English was with them, as with us, the mother tongue, and they could read no other, for they were uneducated. The manuscript might have lain till now upon the shelf of a miserable lodging-house in the heart of London, had it not been brought to light by accident. The owners of it were in poverty, and applied for relief to a benevolent Society, and one of the visitors, upon his charitable errand to them, became acquainted with the existence of the manuscript. He took it home to peruse, and undertook to have it translated and printed, to be sold for the benefit of the writer's descendants.

Now we come to the practical lesson which I draw from contrasting the different condition of the descendants of these two Huguenot refugees, and I desire to impress it upon our minds, with the view of inducing us to aim at obtaining the strong faith of our ancestor.

He believed that God would take care of him and his, if