“Catharine Lacy, I was your nurse at the hospital; I took the living child from your bosom, and placed the dead baby of Louisa Oakley in its place. You were raving, and did not know it. Don’t look so white and so frightened. I had an object. The old French fiend paid me for putting your child out of the way. I did not murder for her money; but I changed the infants, and reported yours dead. More than this, I changed the numbers and names over your cots, and that is why you are registered as dead, and buried, instead of the other.” “But the child, my child!” cried Catharine. “Mary Margaret took it to nurse.” “Mary Margaret!” “Yes, yer ladyship,” said Mrs. Dillon, “I mothered the little crathur, all unbeknowst that it was your baby as I was doing for. Ye had the darlint in yer own blessed arms, more’an onest, and the most beautifullest sight it was to see yez together, like the blessed mother of Christ pictured out over the holy altar, with the hivenly baby in her two arms—amin!” “But the child, my child! Where is it? who has got it now? My own, own child.” “It’s a’most forenant ye, this blessed minit, yer ladyship. Down in the purty house, behint them trees, a-playin’ in the garden, as innercent as a young rabbit. Didn’t I just see the mark of the holy cross, as red as a ruby, which the angels left on his temple—” Mary Margaret broke off suddenly, for Catharine had left the window. In another moment they saw her flitting across the lawn, and under the elms. She was out of sight long before the last sentence was finished. “Let’s go after her,” said Jane Kelly. “I want to see their hearts torn in giving him up.” But they had hardly crossed the lawn, when Catharine came back, walking rapidly, with little Edward in her arms. She rushed by them, raining kisses on the child, and hurrying on, went panting and breathless into the presence of her husband, his grandparents, and Elsie. “George, George, take him—take him, he is our child, yours and mine—our own, own child. Grandfather, grandmother, mother, thank God! thank God! for it is our son, that was lost and is found.” There was some reluctance on the part of Mrs. Louis De Marke to give up all claim on the child she had loved as her own. But all this was compromised in the end by little Edward himself, who divided all the hours of his bright life pretty equally between the old mansion and the Italian cottage during the first year. After that he proclaimed a determination to give up the cottage altogether, for his other mamma had just taken in a mite of a girl-baby that was always crying, and hadn’t sense enough to walk alone; if she was going to keep that little thing, he meant to live at grandfather’s and nowhere else. THE END. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ T. B. PETERSON AND BROTHERS’ PUBLICATIONS. NEW BOOKS ISSUED EVERY WEEK.