Beadle's Dime Novels No. 38: The Wrong Man — page 39: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A SKETCH OF MR. SEDLEY’S HISTORY. 4i | whole group were clad in mourning, which, not more than the fixed dejection of the elder Sedley, and the wan cheeks and tearful eyes of his sister, denoted that some heavy calamity had befallen them. Their tale is briefly told. had been a sailor. After many years spent in his hazardous vocation, he had succeeded in gathering together a small property, with which he was returning from a Southern port, where his wife and children had passed the winter months, to his native place, intending to trust the seas no more. The husband of his sister, who was interested with him in the voyage, was also on board. They had reached within a few hours’ sail of their destination, when a storm rose, which soon put a fatal termination to the plans of life he mind of Sedley had fondly busied itself in framing. The 1, deeply laden, was not long able to sustain the fury of the tempest ; and the tortured parent was doomed to see his wife and one of his two children sink before his eyes, while, almost in the same moment, his brother-in-law was washed off by a wave and carried in an instant beyond the reach of succor. Sedley and his son were rescued from the wreck day or two after, the former in a state of despondency bor. dering upon madness. Returning to his desolate home, the bearer of the sad tidings to his widowed sister, he was seized with an illness which for some weeks seriously threatened his life. The natural strength of his constitution, hardened by long habits of activityy at last trtamphed; but on his re- covery he could not bear to remain amid scenes where every object reminded him of his loss; and, gathering up the small relics of his property, he emigrated to the West. His cup of affliction, however, was not yet full. He had resided there but a few years, when both his son and sister fell victims to one of those epidemic fevers which sometimes made sad havoc among the early settlers in that luxuriant region. The care and attention required by the loyely orphan—the only child of his widowed sister, left by this event to his sole guardianship—in some measure tended to divert his mind and blunt the edge of anguish; and the little prattler her self, too young to know the full extent of her loss, seemed tc strive by every engaging art of childhood to win her nnele from despondency. x — i a ds an le pie pee : : Ccom/cloooks.conn