In a dark room, in a ruined and wretched house, in one of the most filthy districts of a great city, a mother sat watching her sleeping babe. The infant was lying on a hard pallet on the floor, and the mother was sitting beside it on a broken chair, plying her needle with eager haste, and occasionally pausing to look down at her babe or to kiss it as it lay asleep. The child was pale and sickly, and in the close offensive air of the room it seemed to breathe painfully and to inhale, with every pulse of its tender heart, the insidious principles of death and dissolution. But not less pale and wan was the mother, who sat there watching; her features wore that blanched, unearthly hue, and that strange upward light was playing in her eyes, which spoke but too plainly that death was breathing on her. The room was lonely--very lonely--for there were no pictures to adorn its walls, scarcely any articles of common domestic use within it; it was bare, almost unfurnished, dismal, and cold. The mother was engaged in making shirts, and the price which she received for them averaged two-pence-halfpenny each; and it is said that by extraordinary exertions, for twenty hours out of twenty-four, the sum of three shillings may be earned weekly at such labor. Well, the pale, care-worn, suffering mother continued to stitch, stitch, anxiously from hour to hour, leaving off now and then to take her dying baby in her arms and to press it fondly to her breast, until the tide of her heart's affection came stealing forth in tears; and recollecting that the next meal for herself and child must be earned by the continued labor of her jaded hands, she placed the infant on its bed, and again resumed her work. Thus many hours had passed in a silence broken only by the low moaning of the child, as it turned to and fro in the feeble expression of long-continued anguish, and the deep sighs of the mother as she gazed anxiously upon its fevered face, and saw the stamp of want and misery there in an expression akin to the imbecility of years. At length the babe awoke, and the mother took it tenderly into her arms; she pressed it to her breast and kissed the cold dew from its forehead. And now she began to prepare her humble meal, she placed a few sticks of wood in the stove and lighted them, and placed an old broken kettle half filled with water upon them; and then arranged two cups and saucers on a small tray, and took a portion of a loaf from a shelf above. While waiting for the water to boil she gave her child some food; and she had scarcely begun to do this when a heavy and unsteady step was heard upon the threshold; her heart leaped with fear, and she trembled like a moonlight shadow. A creature somewhat in the semblance of a man staggered into the room, and threw himself down upon the pallet where the child had just been sleeping. "Charles, Charles, do not, for God's sake, treat me thus," said the mother of the child, and she sobbed loudly, and was steeped in tears.