CHAPTER XIII.
Madam L——— felt a deep interest in those soldiers who had borne the burdens of our revolution. It was one of her favourite maxims, that their services would be better estimated when the blessings, won by their toil, were more widely diffused, and more fully realized. Could she have seen through the vista of future years, a band, small, feeble, and hoary, yet bending less beneath the burdens of age, than those of poverty, going forth like the widow of Zarepta, to gather sticks to dress a handful of meal, that they might eat it and die; she would scarcely have been convinced that these were the defenders of her country. Had she seen, in vision, a mother redeemed from servitude by the blood of her sons, yet withholding from their necessities a scanty pittance, till by far the greater number of them had sought refuge where wounds fester no more, she would not have acknowledged such an emblem of the land that gave her birth. She could not have been induced to believe, that her dear native country, like the officer of the Egyptian king, in his transition from a prison to a place near the throne, "remembered not Joseph, but forgat him."
