It is that hour of day's decline when the turbulent roar from the city's busy mart is hushed into a lazy hum, when a peaceful, quiet calm breathes through the atmosphere and settles on the noisy earth, as if all things were hushed into tranquil silence at thought of the coming twilight's holy hour. The sun's red, slanting rays fall on the dusty pavement in front of that gloomy, stately mansion which Harry calls his home, enter a richly furnished room where the blinds are thrown open and the curtains looped back, and with their fervent glow rest compassionately upon a drooping female figure, upon a bent head bowed in shame, a head still young, whose wealth of rich black tresses passion and remorse have already marked with gray. Sin-stricken, woe-stricken, and remorseful, feeling how inefficient is even her mother's love, how powerless every earthly consideration to hold her back from ruin; stretching out palsied hands to Heaven for help; racked by the fierce fires of repentance, her tortured soul corroded by remorse, she mourns passionately but unavailingly. Oh! there are hours like this in the hidden history of every fallen and degraded son of Adam, when the scales are removed from the spiritual eyes, and the sin-stained soul shiveringly beholds the depth to which it has fallen, and shrinks back appalled at the sight; when the demon has departed for a season, and evil thoughts and evil influences are cast out, and, feeling their power returning with repentance, angels come to minister unto the sorrowing one. Gentle guardians are there, who have watched it all its life through, striven with all the means that lie within the grasp of a spirit's power to stay it on its downward course and bring the lost soul back. Ah! 'Love's labor lost.' Ineffectual these oft-repeated efforts _may_ be, ineffectual through all time they doubtless will be; but who shall say in the 'land of the undying' that the work of ministering love shall not continue? What man is that, that in an hour like this can look upon his brother, prostrate in spirit, racked with remorse, no matter how vile and polluted, and can say anguish like this shall be that soul's undying portion in the long hereafter; that God's justice requires infinite punishment for a finite crime; that, when freed from its earthly body, the ears of the All-Compassionate shut out that soul's despairing cry for pardon? Who shall limit infinite mercy? Who shall set bounds to Divine compassion, or think that, toiling painfully and slowly up the endless heights of progression, there shall not be a time away onward in the solemn future, hidden in the dim mists of ages yet to come, when that soul shall be cleansed from its pollution, freed from its mourning, sin entirely cast out, and God shall be all and in all?