He was a bright, pretty child, easily influenced for good or evil, and the rude mother shuddered as she felt creeping over her the conviction that she had helped to make him what he grew to be, laughing at his fierce temper and at times provoking him on purpose, just to see him bump his little round, hard head against the oaken floor. Then, as he grew older, it was fun to hear him imitate the oaths his father used, and she had laughed at that until the habit became so firmly fixed that neither threats nor punishment could break it. And when the Sabbath bells were pealing forth their summons to the house of prayer, she had suffered him to stay away, offering but slight remonstrance when the robin’s nest just without the door was pilfered of its unfledged occupants, the mother-bird moaning over its murdered young, just as she was moaning now over her ruined boy. Poor Harry! There was some excuse for him, some apology found in the nature of his early training, but for her who reared him,—none. She might have taught him better. She might have sent him to the Sunday school across the way, where Sunday after Sunday she had heard the hymns the children sang swelling on the Sabbath air, Harry sometimes joining in as he sat in the cottage door, adjusting the bait with which to tempt the unsuspecting fish playing in the brook nearby. A mother’s fearful responsibility had been hers. She had not fulfilled it, and it rolled back upon her now, stinging as only remorse can sting, and making her wish amid her pain that the boy, once so earnestly desired, had never been given her, or else had died in its cradle bed, and so gone where she knew the hardened in sin never could find entrance. So absorbed was she in her grief as not to hear the sound of wheels stopping near her gate, nor the tripping footstep upon the floor. Rose Mather, restless at home and wishing for something to do, had remembered the miserable woman, and knowing how desolate her comfortless house must seem that summer night, she had conquered her aversion to the place and come to speak, if possible, a word of cheer. Mrs. Baker’s howls always had the effect of making her laugh, they seemed so forced, so unnatural; but there was something so new, so real in the stillness of that figure crouching upon the bed, that Rose for a moment was uncertain how to act. It was no feigned sorrow of which she was a witness now, and advancing at last towards the untidy bed, she laid her hand upon the disordered, uncombed hair, and whispered soothingly, “I am so sorry for you, Mrs. Baker, and I’ll do all I can to help you. I’ll give you money to make your cottage pleasanter, and by and by you won’t feel so badly, maybe.”