I had stepped across the street to her husband's workshop, to order a new meat barrel. I found him putting a barrel together, assisted by a fine little girl of ten years of age, who embraced the staves with her thin supple arms, while the father slipped one of the hoops over them in order to secure them in their place. It was a pretty picture; the smiling rosy face of the girl looking down upon her father, as he stooped over the barrel adjusting the hoop, his white curling hair falling over her slender arms. Just then the door was flung open, and Mrs. --- rushed in like a fury. "Katrine, where are you?" "Here, mother," said the child, very quietly. How dar'd you to leave the cradle widout my lave?" "Father called me," and the child turned pale, and began to tremble. "I came for a moment to help him." "You little wretch!" cried the unjust woman, seizing the child by the arm. "I'll teach you to mind him more nor you mind me. Take that, and _that_." Here followed an awful oath, and such a blow upon the bare neck of the unhappy child, that she left her hold of the barrel, and fairly shrieked with pain. "Let the girl alone, Mary; it was my fault," said the husband. "Yes, it always is your fault! but she shall pay for it;" and, taking up a broken hoop, she began to beat the child furiously. My woman's heart could stand it no longer. I ran forward, and threw my arms round the child. "Get out wid you!" she cried; "what business is it of yours? I'll break your head if you are not off out of this." "I'm not afraid of you, Mrs. ---; but I would not see you use a dog in that manner, much less a child, who has done nothing to deserve such treatment." "Curse you all!" said the human fiend, flinging down her ugly weapon, and scowling upon us with her gloomy eyes. "I wish you were all in ---." A place far too warm for this hot season of the year, I thought, as I walked sorrowfully home. Bad as I then considered her, I have now no doubt that it was the incipient workings of her direful malady, which certainly comes nearest to any idea we can form of demoniacal possession. She is at present an incurable but harmless maniac; and, in spite of the instance of cruelty that I have just related towards her little girl, now, during the dark period of her mind's eclipse, gleams of maternal love struggled like glimpses of sunshine through a stormy cloud, and she inquired of me earnestly, pathetically, nay, even tenderly, for her children. Alas, poor maniac! How could I tell her that the girl she had chastised so undeservedly had died in early womanhood, and her son, a fine young man of twenty, had committed suicide, and flung himself off the bridge into the Moira river only a few months before. Her insanity saved her from the knowledge of events, which might have distracted a firmer brain. She seemed hardly satisfied with my evasive answers, and looked doubtingly and cunningly at me, as if some demon had whispered to her the awful truth.