"'Now, God knows where she lives--they say it's in a bad house; and it's I who am afraid she's gittin' Tommy, her broder, into the same way, for he doesn't come home now. O God! _I might as well be in hell!_' Nothing can convey the tone of despair with which that was said. She told me how the girl had been such a bright little one. 'She was so pretty, sir; and maybe we flattered her, and made too much of her. And her father, he thought she ought to learn the dressmakin' trade, but she felt somehow above it, and she went to be a book-folder downtown. And one day we missed her till late o' night; and thin the next night it was later, and at last her father--bless his poor soul!--he said she shouldn't be out so, and whipt her. And thin she niver came back for three nights, and we thought, maybe, she's at her work, and has to stay late; and we niver suspected how it was, when, suddenly, Mrs. Moore came and said as how Maggy said she was at Mrs. Rooney's--the ould divil--and my husband wouldn't belave it at all; but I wint and bust open the door wid a stone, and found _her_--my own child--there wid a lot of men and women; and I swore at 'em, and the M. P.'s they come and cleared 'em all out, and there was the last of her. She's niver been an honest woman since, when she's in liquor. It broke her father's heart. He died the next Saturday; people said it was some sort of dysentry, but I know it was this. God help me! And, now, sir (almost fiercely), can't you get me out of this? All I want is, to sell my shanty, and wid my two little ones, git away from _her._ I don't care how far!' "The mother fleeing her daughter. The pretty child becomes a drunken outcast! So ends many a sad history in our city." THE DYING SEWING-WOMAN.