And in execution of this fancy--a very fair
and reasonable one, and not uncommon at that time, whatever it may be
now, when people are not so provident--he had got an insurance to the
extent of five hundred pounds effected in the Pelican Office--perhaps
the most famous at that time--on the lives of the said twins, Mary and
Annie, who were, no doubt, altogether unconscious of the importance they
were thus made to hold in the world.
Yet, unfortunately for the far-seeing and provident father, this scheme
threatened to fructify sooner than he wished, if indeed it could ever
have fructified to his satisfaction; for the grisly spectre of typhus
laid his relentless hand upon Mary when she--and of a consequence
Annie--was somewhere about eight years old. And surely, being as we are
very hopeful optimists in the cause of human nature, we need not say
that the father, as he and his wife watched the suffering invalid on
through the weary days and nights of the progress towards the crisis of
that dangerous ailment, never once thought of the Pelican, except as a
bird that feeds its young with the warm blood of its breast.
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