When five months pregnant with her second child, the news was suddenly brought to Mrs. W. that her husband, whom business had called several hundred miles from his home, had been stricken down with yellow fever, and, among total strangers, had passed away, in his delirium calling wildly on his wife for help. The loss made a more profound impression on Mrs. W. than it would have done had she not been pregnant. She had accepted Mr. W. from sentiments of gratitude, and now she was moved to make a strict self-examination as to her imperfect appreciation of his love and kindness. Worldly motives and thoughts were silenced. Conscience and finer judgment were active. The second child, modified by these four grave, earnest months, was made up of sincerity, earnest thought, and unfailing benevolence. Her early disregard for appearances, as compared to realities, made a wide gulf that could never be bridged between the two sisters. There was absolutely no relationship between them. Marian’s plain, honest, eager, affectionate face was grand beside the empty, pretty one of her elder sister. The younger was slow in developing her whole nature, which was transcendent in its interior moral characteristics. The blow came too late to seriously injure the physical. There was just the unavoidably less degree of robustness between herself and sister, which, with the absence of hope and common gayety, favored gravity in the former. THE BLACK SHEEP. The black sheep of a family is to be pitied rather than hated. He is the wronged, as well as the wrong-doer. Many years ago such an one came frequently under my observation. The family consisted of five boys and three girls, all but the one in question remarkably good-looking, gentle-hearted, fairly intelligent, thoroughly temperate, and honest. The third, in order, of the boys, was a coarse, brutal, unprincipled fellow, the dread and despair of his timid mother, whose money, and even clothing, he would steal (the latter to pawn), and whose life he would constantly threaten when a mere lad. He was at home only in a groggery, and that not so much on account of a love of liquor, as from his need of companions on his own plane. He was more than once in prison; oftener escaped through the prayers and management of his mother. Who, now, was responsible for this dangerous member of society?