"Oh, my child," she sobbed, "my poor child, murdered by its father's hand, the victim of his cruelty; oh, Father of all, Father of the wicked and good, take my poor babe to thy fostering bosom, and let me die too, for my last hope is gone, the last link of my heart's affection is broken; Father of mercies, listen to the supplications of a childless mother!" That step! and the blood goes back to her heart like an icy flood, and every pulse is withered, as with a bleak and desolating frost; she holds her breath, and with her dead child in her arms, crouches down in the corner on the floor, and in the silence of despair and terror asks her God to bless and protect her, and to soften his heart in such an awful moment as this. He came to the threshold of the room, and fell prostrate on the floor as he attempted to approach her; he was too much intoxicated to rise, and there he lay muttering, in broken and inarticulate words, the most horrible oaths and imprecations. The mother spake not, for although, even then she could have prayed for him in her heart, and bless him with her tongue; ay, and still labor for him with her hands, if by such she could win back the old love which had made her youthful hours glad, and which had spread the rosy atmosphere of hope before her; but which was now a thing of silent memory, of sadness, and of tears. Thus passed away the morning, and at noon the drunkard arose from where he lay, and again demanded what money she had; she gave him a few halfpence from her pocket, and he snatched them from her and departed. To know that he had gone to procure the poison on which he fed, with this last remnant of the midnight toil, and when his child lay dead within its mother's arms; to know that for the veriest morsel she must toil again, sleepless and famished, and with the withered blossom of her heart's broken hope beside her; to know that the last office of affection, the burial of the child, must be performed by those who cared for neither her nor it, and who would desecrate, by the vile touch of parochial charity, that which had been more dear to her than her own life; to know that all her joys were wasted now, and that she still lived to hear him curse her in the very place where death had so lately been; and that although she sat before him with the sleeping infant in her arms, while he was too brutalized by drink to know that that sleep was one from which it would never more awake, and that her own terror made her speechless when she would have told him; all this was a torrent of sorrow, before whose overbearing force her wintered heart gave way, and she sank down upon the floor, with her dead babe in her arms, senseless.