Leaving Foxlaw, we shall introduce the reader to Sparling Street, in Liverpool. Amongst the miserable cellars where the poor are crowded together, and where they are almost without light and without air, one near the foot of the street was distinguished by its outward cleanliness; and in the window was a ticket with the words--"_A Girl's School kept here, by_ A. GRAHAM." Over this humble cellar was a boarding-house, from which, ever and anon, the loud laugh of jolly seamen rang boisterous as on their own element. By a feeble fire in the comfortless cellar, sat an emaciated, and apparently dying man; near him sat his wife, engaged in making such articles of apparel as the slop-dealers send to the West Indies, and near the window was a pale but beautiful young woman, instructing a few children in needle-work and the rudiments of education. The children being dismissed, she began to assist her mother; and, addressing her father, said-- "Come, cheer up, dear father--do not give way to despondency--we shall see better times. Come, smile now, and I will sing your favourite song." "Heaven bless thee, my own sweet child!" said the old man, while the tears trickled down his cheeks. "Thou wilt sing to cheer me, wilt thou?--bless thee!--bless thee! It is enough that, in my old age, I eat thy bread, my child!--sing not!--sing not!--there is no music now for thy father's heart." "Oh, speak not--think not thus," she cried, tenderly; "you make me sad, too." "I would not make thee sad, love," returned he, "but it is hard--it is very hard--that, after cruising till I had made a fortune, as I may say, and after being anchored in safety, to be tempted to make another voyage, where my all was wrecked--and not only all wrecked, but my little ones too--thy brothers and thy sisters, Ann--to see them struck down one after another, and I hardly left wherewith to bury them--it is hard to bear, child!--and, worse than all, to be knocked up like a useless hulk, and see thee and thy mother toiling and killing themselves for me--it is more than a father's heart can stand, Ann." "Nay, repine not, father," said she: "He who tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb, will not permit adversity to press on us more hardly than he gives us strength to endure it. Though we suffer poverty, our exertions keep us above want." The old woman turned aside her head and wept. "True, dear," added he, "thy exertions keep us from charity; but those exertions, my child, will not long be able to make--I see it--I feel it? And, oh, Ann, shall I see thee and thy mother inmates of a workhouse--shall I hear men call thy father, Bill Graham, the old pauper?" The sweat broke upon the old man's brow from his excitement; his daughter strove to soothe him, and, with an assumed playfulness, commenced singing Skinner's beautiful old man's song, beginning-- "Oh, why should old age so much wound us!"