"I was left alone amid the lightning and thunder and the noise of the rain; my poor dead sister seemed to call out from the clouds, that I should help her spirit free from the raging of the tempest--I think all this worked on my brain, for I sat and looked on the babe with a stillness that seemed to last for months. I thought of her broken life--of the poverty she had felt--of that which must follow her child. I thought of that woman, so paltry, so mean, so utterly unworthy of care, pampered with wealth, comforted with love, while my sister, so much her better in everything had died of neglect, I thought of many things, not connectedly, but in a wild bitter mood that made me fierce under the wrongs that had been heaped upon us. It is impossible for me to say how the idea came first, but I resolved that her child should not be the sufferer. His father was miserably poor, but he would not, I knew, give up his child. I did not reason, but these thoughts flashed through my brain, and with them came an impulse to give her child the destiny which Anna's should escape. I tore a blanket from the bed; poor Anna did not need it then. I wrapped it about the child and went forth into the storm. The lightning blazed along my path, and the thunder boomed over me like minute guns when a funeral is in motion. "I knew the house well, and stole in through the back door onward to the half-lighted chamber of Farnham's wife. Her son lay in a sumptuous crib under a cloud of lace. I laid Anna's babe on the floor and took this one from its silken nest. My hands were cold and trembling, but the dresses were soon changed, and in a few minutes I went out with Farnham's heir rolled up in my blanket, and Anna's child sleeping sweetly in the cradle that I had robbed." Mrs. Farnham started up, pale and trembling. "What, what! my child rolled up in a blanket! a mean, coarse blanket!" "Be still," commanded aunt Hannah; "your child has had nothing but coarse blankets all his life; but he is all the better for that; ask him if I have not toiled that he and the good man who brought him up might never want; but I was a feeble woman and could do no more--a woman weighed down by a sense of the crime which I might repent of daily, but could not force myself to confess." "But my child! where is my child, you horrible kidnapper?" cried Mrs. Farnham. "I will know--but remember, if he's been brought up among common people and all that, I never will own him." "Your son," said aunt Hannah, going gently toward Joseph Esmond, and laying her hand on his shoulder. "This is your son; he is worthy of any mother's love." "My son, and married to that thing! I never will own him, don't ask me, I never will!" cried the excited woman, eyeing the youth, disdainfully. "He is handsome enough, but I cannot own him for my son!" "Mother," said the youth, rising and coming forward, with both hands extended. "Mother, why will you not love me?"