“Why, miss, that’s very considerate in you, and only that I know it would be for her benefit, I am sure I would not have said a word--but here I have so very little to give her, and that little so coarse fare to what she been used to, both when she was at service, and when she was with her own people, that I be afraid, weak as she be grown now, she won’t do. And though I have been a good nurse in my day, I think she wants now a bit better doctor than I be--and then if she could see the minister, to take the weight off her heart, to make her not fret so, to bid her look up above for comfort, and to raise her with the hope and trust that God will have more mercy upon her than her father and mother do have; and to make her--hardest of all!--forget him that has forsaken her and her little one, and been so cruel--Oh! ladies, to do all that, needs a person that can speak to her better and with more authority than I can.” The poor woman stopped again for some minutes, and then recollecting that she had not told what she had intended to tell, she said, “I suppose, ladies, you guess now how it be, and I ought to beg pardon for speaking of such a thing, or such a one, as--as poor Kate is now, to you, young ladies; but though she is fallen so low, and an outcast, she is not hardened; and if it had been so that it had pleased Heaven that she had been a wife to one in her own condition--Oh! what a wife, and what a mother there was lost in her! The man that wronged her has a deal to answer for. But he has no thought of that, nor care for her, or his child; but he is a fine man about London, they say, driving about with colonels, and lords, and dancing with ladies. Oh! if they saw Kate, one would guess they would not think so much of him: but yet, may be, they’d think more--there’s no saying how the quality ladies judge on these matters. But this I know, that though he was very free of his money, and generous to Kate at the first, and even for some months after he quit the country, till I suppose he forgot her, yet he has not sent her a guinea for self or child these four months, nor a line of a letter of any kind, which she pined for more, and we kept thinking the letters she did write did not get to him by the post, so we sent one by a grandson of my own, that we knowed would put the letter safe into his hands, and did, just as the young gentleman was, as my grandson told me, coming out of a fine house in London, and going, with a long whip in his hand, to get upon the coach-box of a coach, with four horses too--and he looks at the letter, and puts it in his pocket, and calls to my boy, ‘No answer now, my good friend--but I’ll write by post to her.’ Those were the very words; and then that colonel that was with him laughing and making game like, went to snatch the letter out of the pocket, saying, ‘Show us that love-letter, Buckhurst’--Lord forgive me! what have I done now?” said the old woman, stopping short, struck by the sudden change in the