Page:The Mysterious Warning - Parsons (1796, volume 3).djvu/4

 During the suspension of the next campaign, he went to Strasburg to visit a very distant relation, who had thought proper to recognize him when he was in a situation to provide for himself. With this old gentleman he staid some time, and unfortunately lost his heart to a very amiable young woman, who had every claim to admiration but one. That trifling deficiency in my father's eye, though of great magnitude in the estimation of wiser and more prudent men, was the want of fortune. My father, who had been bred up in the school of liberality, who had no selfish considerations, and paid but little attention to prudential maxims, no sooner discovered that his heart was irrevocably fixed, and that the lady's character justified his pretensions, than he openly avowed his partiality, and sought to gain her favour. In vain his relation remonstrated, soothed, allured, and threatened. He was master of himself—of his own affections—despised such paltry objections as the want of money; persisted in his endeavours to gain the lady—-