Granted, to each and every head of your description, my dear madam! But, for all that, his obdurate wife had not come to love him. I blush to say it; but while we are stripping hearts let us not be squeamish! There had been seasons, lasting sometimes for weeks, when her existence was a continual warfare between repugnance to him and her sense of duty; when she dreaded to hear his step in the hall, and shrank inwardly from his caress; watched and fought, until strength and mind were well-nigh gone. Mark me! I do not deny that this was as irrational as it was reprehensible; but I have never held up my poor Sarah as a model of reason or propriety. From the beginning, I have made her case a warning. The fates forbid that I should commend it to any as an example for imitation! A passionate, proud, reticent girl; a trusting, loving, deceived woman; a hopeless, desperate bride--whose heart lay like a pulseless stone in her breast at the most ardent love-words of her husband, and throbbed with wild, uncontrollable emotion at the fraternal tone and kiss of her lost and only love--I have no plea for her, save the words of Infinite compassion and Divine knowledge of human nature and human woe: "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at her!" The highly respectable firm of which Mr. Hammond was the junior member, was adding, if not field to field, thousand to thousand, of the wherewithal for the purchase of fields, or, what was better still, city lots. Mrs. Lewis Hammond had set up her carriage about a year after her marriage; said equipage being a gift from her generous husband on the occasion of the first airing of the little "Baby Belle," as she was always called in the family. Not until subsequent events had endowed it with deeper and saddest interest did Sarah read Aldrich's beautiful poem bearing the above title. Lewis' mother's name was Isabella. Her grandchild received the same, which became "Belle" on the mother's tongue, and then, because it was natural to say "Baby" too, the pretty alliteration was adopted. To a man of Lewis' domestic tastes the advent of this child was a source of the liveliest pleasure, and the tiny inmate of his household was another and a powerful tie, binding him to a home already dear. But to the mother's lonely life, so bare of real comfort or joy--haunted by memory and darkened by remorse--the precious gift came like a ray of Heaven's purest light, a strain of angel music, saying to care, "Sleep!" to hope, "Awake, the morning cometh!" Beneath the sunshine of so much love, the infant throve finely, and without being a greater prodigy than the nine hundred and ninety-nine miracles of beauty and sprightliness who, with it, composed the thousand "blessed babies" of the day, was still a pretty, engaging creature, whose gurgling laugh and communicative "coo" beguiled the mother's solitude and made cheerful the lately silent house.