My experience as a seamstress thus far subjected me to mere trials of temper, or mortifications of personal pride, but never to the calamities which sometimes fall so heavily on others in a like position. Hence, while spared the latter, I was too much disposed to magnify the former: for, let our trials be few and light as they may, we are generally prone to consider them the greatest that could befall. The griefs of others, their losses, their calamities, as has often been well said, we can all bear with surprising fortitude: it is only our own that we are disposed to regard as unendurable. But in this time of discouragement there were cases brought to my notice, the severity of which fairly humbled me in the dust, filling my heart with thankfulness at the exemption extended to us, and showing me that afflictions are really great or insignificant only by comparison. One sleety wintry night the low wail of a new-born infant was heard issuing from a bundle of ragged clothing which some poor creature had laid down on the doorstep of a house in a small by-street not many squares from our own. The house was occupied in part by a man named Varick, who had a wife and several children. This man had been an industrious mechanic, but had for two years been pursuing the downward path to ruin, a confirmed victim of the bottle. He had been forced by the destitution thus brought upon himself to abandon a snug abode in a decent street for the squalor of a rickety shell in a mean locality, and was now prostrate on his bed, dying of rapid consumption. By what mysterious providence a new-born babe should thus be sent to such a man's door is beyond my comprehension. But the wife of Varick, softer of heart than its mother, took in the shivering waif, adopted it in place of one only a few weeks older, which she had buried two days previous, and resisted all urgency of the few friends she had to send it to the almshouse.