A few days since when walking to my chambers, I saw a hearse moving slowly before me. It stopped at the door of a respectable house; all the windows were closed. A coffin, covered with blue cloth, apparently of a child about fourteen was raised into the hearse. I happened to look up; I saw one of the shutters slightly opened, and a female looking anxiously. The hearse moved on. As the procession turned the corner of the street, I had the curiosity, not an idle curiosity, to look back; I saw the same female; she had partly opened the window. “The King took the two sons of Rizpath, and the five sons of Michael whom she brought up, and he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the hill before the Lord, and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days in the beginning of barley harvest. “And Rizpath took sackcloth and spread it for herself upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven,--and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night. Nor did she cease to watch them, until David, touched by this depth of affection, gave them burial with the bones of their forefathers.” So too we see in every picture of the Crucifixion, the mother standing with patience and resignation at the foot of the cross: “She when Apostles shrank could danger brave, Last at his Cross, and earliest at his Grave.” OLD MAIDS. Such is the influence of female affection upon youth: but to youth it is not confined. It exists at all times of life wherever woman exists. It has been my good fortune to share the friendship of many of a very interesting class of persons, I mean _old maids_. They have their faults, who has not? But I know well, that most of them abound with kindness; which may be seen even by the animals by which they are surrounded, and by their many misdirected enthusiasms. “The inclination to goodness,” says Lord Bacon, “is imprinted deeply in our nature, insomuch that if it issue not towards men, it will take unto other living creatures.”