'
NEW TRIALS.
The reader will pardon this passing homily, while we return to our
narrative.
We were saying that the day-dreams of Isabella and her husband-the plan
they drew of what they would do, and the comforts they thought to have,
when they should obtain their freedom, and a little home of their own-
had all turned to 'thin air,' by the postponement of their freedom to
so late a day. These delusive hopes were never to be realized, and a
new set of trials was gradually to open before her. These were the
heart-wasting trials of watching over her children, scattered, and
imminently exposed to the temptations of the adversary, with few, if
any, fixed principles to sustain them.
'Oh,' she says, 'how little did I know myself of the best way to
instruct and counsel them! Yet I did the best I then knew, when with
them. I took them to the religious meetings; I talked to, and prayed
for and with them; when they did wrong, I scolded at and whipped them.'
Isabella and her son had been free about a year, when they went to
reside in the city of New York; a place which she would doubtless have
avoided, could she have foreseen what was there in store for her; for
this view into the future would have taught her what she only learned
by bitter experience, that the baneful influences going up from such a
city were not the best helps to education, commenced as the education
of her children had been.
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