Days, days, days! Whether of pleasure or of pain, how noiselessly they steal away, and leap from the juttings of Time. Say what you will: let theologians crack their skulls in harrowing up proofs to the contrary: we are the creatures of circumstance. Take the fair maiden, in the bloom of a life of promise; how long ere the mirror will proclaim to her the coming of that signet of waning years, the first grey hair? And upon each of us there is written a destiny--a fate. We may put forth our human might and throw up barriers against the tide, it availeth not; we are swept into the lap of that destiny at last. CHAPTER V. _Good out of Evil--Maria before the Police Court--The Works of a Philanthropist--An Unfortunate Sickness--The Amorous Physician--Return to her Native Home--Her Marriage and the Effects of it--Despair and Desperation--Her Victims--Her Awful Murder--Reflections on Fate and Death._ About four months after the occurrences which we have just narrated, in mid-winter, a young woman sat in the garret of a wooden dwelling at the corner of Harrison avenue and Kneeland street, in the southerly portion of the city of Boston, industriously plying the needle by a small but cheerful fire. It was Maria Bickford, certainly in a much better and more encouraging situation than while sojourning at that abode of iniquity in Lowell street. Her face was worn but not melancholy, and her bosom heaved a sigh and her voice trembled, while she sung the song of “Home, sweet home.” There had been a change in her condition--good had come to her out of evil. The truth of the matter was, that the authorities, being at length informed as to the character of the establishment in Lowell street, made an onset upon it at midnight, captured the inmates, male and female, in their beds, and carried them to Leveret street jail. The next morning, while before the Police Court awaiting sentence--the price of her degradation--she was accosted by a celebrated philanthropist, who desired to speak with her. He told her that it was probable she would be sent to the House of Correction, if no intercession were made to the judge in her behalf; that if she would from that day make a resolution to change her conduct, he would try to procure her discharge, by the payment of a fine. She heard him doubtingly, yet imploringly; for her confidence in any thing like unselfishness in man was small indeed. Through a profusion of tears, which a crowd of idling by-standers ridiculed as harlot’s crocodiles, she thanked him, and gave a promise that if he helped her in that moment of freezing horror, her life should be placed at his disposal. He did effect her release by the payment of ten dollars; led her into the street and told her that she was free; and then began to urge upon her mind, in an earnest and affecting manner, the importance and the glory of reformation. He pointed out the manner by which a respectable