HKB
makes me grieve myself; and I only give you, because you compel me to it, so particular and so exact an answer to so particular and so exacting a question.
The mother, who took the paper, was prudent enough to conceal from the daughter what he said; but nature would force its way, and bubbled from her eyes; and the daughter perceiving that, pressed hard to see it, and wept at the consideration that hard fate, though she knew not particularly what way, was to befall her. Never surely was anything so beautiful in tears, and I obtained of the mother to see the writing. At last, in general terms, to free her from a suspense of mind, it was told her that some trouble should happen to her that should diminish her beauty. She had courage enough to hear that misfortune with disdain, and crying, If that be all, I am armed, I don't place much pride in that which I know age must shortly after destroy, if trouble did not do it before; and she dried up her tears; and, if what Mr. Bruyere says, be true, viz., that the last thing a celebrated woman thinks of when she dies, is the loss of her beauty, she showed an admirable pattern of female philosophy, in bearing such a cruel prediction with such unspeakable magnanimity, as exceeded even the patience of stern stoicism, considering she was a woman, to whom beauty is more dear than life.
If any evil, that is impending over people's heads, could be evaded by foreknowledge, or eluded by art, she had the fairest opportunity of having this prediction annulled, which would have been more to the satisfaction of the predictor than knowing it verified, than ever any woman had. Her mother was specifically told that the fatal distemper should be the smallpox; her father was, and is still, a very eminent physician; and distempers of that kind, especially, are much more easily prevented by care, than cured by art, and by art more easily set aside, when there is a timely warning given to a physician to prepare the body against the danger of the poison, than when the distemper has once catched hold of a body at unawares, when it is unpurged of any gross humours that may accompany it. But neither the foreknowledge and caution of the mother, nor the skill and wisdom of the great physician her father, were sufficient to ward off the approaching harm, that was written in the books of fate. Not many suns had finished their yearly courses, before she was forced to submit to the inevitable stroke of death, after the infectious and malicious malady had first ravished her beauty, rioted in all her sweets, and made an odious deformed spectacle of the charmer of mankind. The death of the daughter worked hard upon the mother's bowels, and dragged her speedily after her, with a broken heart to the grave.