attraction for trifles which the mind often
experiences in its hours of suffering, mechanically, one after another,
she has traced them all. Now the varied tones cease to pervade the
atmosphere, and there is a long resting pause. When the music begins
again, it is on the pavement, almost beneath the window, and the old
musician, perhaps unconsciously wrought upon by the silent influence of
the hour, has merged from the gay to the pathetic, and plays only sad
little pieces in the minor key. Presently from the multitude of sweet
sounds there arises on the air a song lower and sadder than the
others--a strange, pathetic melody, falling on the ear like a low,
plaintive wail, broken by keen throbs of agony: her whole nature beats
in responsive echo. O God! gone so far down the dreary road which has
darkly led her from that time of purity and peace when that song was
nightly sung to her; after so many weary years of sin and suffering, to
hear those notes again! It is but a simple thing which has the power so
to move her, a mere nothing; half dirge, half hymn, familiar to her
long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With
her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the
past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood in
its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the
holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble,
womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning
appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her now, pale, wan, and
spectre-like. Oh! to sit down, side by side with her former self; to see
herself as she used to be before the tempter crept into the Eden of her
heart; to look despairingly up to the height whence she had fallen, so
wrecked in moral strength that she had not the power to retrace a single
step! Peace departed, virtue lost, health undermined, affection
squandered, ruthlessly murdering the peace of one whose life through all
the time of its sad earth-sojourning is linked with hers; cursing the
home she should have blessed and brightened, making of that fair garden,
wherein sweet domestic graces should have bloomed and blossomed as the
rose, but a desolate and barren waste, knowing that hearts, little
hearts, that had drawn their life-beat from her own, had starved and
sickened for the love which is their rightful food;--with senses bleared
and deadened, she had heard them piteous