The room was a low garret, black with age, and tottering to ruin. In its best days it had been at most but a wretched apartment, for at its highest part it would scarcely admit of a man standing upright, while on the opposite side the cracked and leaky ceiling shelved down until it met the floor. The walls had once been plastered, but age had long since peeled them nearly bare; and the time-stained beams of which the building had been constructed—it was a wooden one—now gaped through many a crevice. In several places even the weather-boarding without had given way or rotted off, admitting in copious draughts, the biting wintry blast which roared around the house. A solitary candle burned in the room, flaring wildly as the gusts whirled through the apartment. There was no fire-place in the garret—God knows it was well enough!—for the poverty-stricken inmates had not wherewithal to purchase food, much less fuel. No furniture was in the room, except an old chest, a broken cup or two, and the ricketty bedstead, on which, with a mattress of straw beneath her, lay that suffering wife. She was pale, emaciated, and evidently ill, but, amid it all, you could see on her wasted countenance, traces of the rarest beauty. The marble forehead; the classic eye-brow; the Grecian contour of face; the finely chiselled mouth and throat; and above all, the dark blue eye, its chastened expression lighting up the whole countenance as with an angel’s purity, told what must have been the loveliness of the sufferer, before care, or poverty, or woe had driven their iron ploughshares through her soul. Oh! well might it fill her husband’s heart with agony to look upon her now, and think of the day when in far different circumstances, he led her a blushing bride, to his home. But if such were his feelings when gazing on his angelic wife, how far more poignant did they become as his eye fell upon the almost famished babe lying in her arms. Poor little thing! it had fallen asleep at length, after crying long for that sustenance which its mother had not to give, although she would have drained her heart’s blood, if, by so doing, she could have appeased the hunger of her babe. By its side lay a boy, apparently about four years of age, his little delicate face worn with hunger and privation, and his thin fingers tightly grasping the bed-clothes, as though he feared lest some one should snatch the scanty covering from around his form. Alas! he had been early introduced to misfortune. Often had he gone supperless to bed of late, forbearing even to ask for food, because he knew his mother had it not, and that it would only pain her to refuse him; and often, too, when her husband being absent in the vain search after employment, his mother would indulge freely in the tears she checked in his presence, her little boy would climb upon her knee, and throwing his wan arms around her neck, kiss her and tell her not to cry. At such times the mother’s tears would