We read in the daily papers the announcement of a wretch that, for a certain price, she will kill the unborn child,--an announcement made in plain terms, and paid for as an advertisement,--and we are dumb. It is the nineteenth century: will not future ages, raking the advertisement of this infamous woman from some dark corner, guess the awful secrets of the nineteenth century from that one infernal blot? We see a carriage drawn by blooded steeds, whirling through Broadway; its only occupant a handsomely-attired female. And we say to ourselves, "There goes the murderess of mother and of the unborn child--there goes the wretch who thrives by the slaughter of lost womanhood; who owns a splendid carriage, a fine mansion, and a magnificent fortune, in the very vortex of a depraved social world--there goes the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of Hell." These words none of us dare say aloud; we only think of them; and we shudder as we see them written on paper,--they are so horribly true. And as we ask--Why is such a creature _needed_ in the world? Why does she find _employment_? Why do a hundred such as her, thrive and grow rich in the large cities? we are forced to accept one of these two answers: 1. A bad social state, based upon enormous wealth and enormous poverty,--a social state which gives to the few the very extravagancies of luxury, and deprives the countless many of the barest rights and comforts of life,--finds its natural result in the existence of this Madam Resimer. Or,-- 2. Human nature is thoroughly depraved. A certain portion of the race are born to be damned in this world, as well as in the next. Such creatures as Madam Resimer, are but the proper instruments of that damnation. Upon my soul, good friend, who read this book, these answers are worthy of some moments of attentive thought. Arthur Dermoyne stood in the gloom of that winter midnight,--a midnight awful and profound, and only deepened in its solemnity, by the clear, cold light of the wintery stars. A thousand thoughts flitted over his brain, as he gazed upon the fatal house. Was Alice already a tenant of that loathsome den? Again and again, he rejected the thought, but still, it came back upon him, and crept like ice through his veins. If she was, indeed, _within_ these walls, what might be her fate ere the morrow's dawn? Arthur could not repress a cry of anguish. A vague picture of a lost woman, put to death in the dark, by the gripe of a fiend in human shape, seemed to pass before him, like a shadow from the other world. He surveyed the house. A street-lamp, which stood some paces from it, shed a faint gleam over its walls, and served to show, that from cellar to garret, it was closed like a tomb. The wealthy tenants of the houses on either hand, had evidently retired to their beds. Not a gleam of light shone from their many windows.