n than the shopman is at
first inclined to offer, which a perfect stranger would be little
disposed to do; and the elder female urges her daughter on, in scarcely
audible whispers, to exert her utmost powers of persuasion to obtain an
advance of the sum, and expatiate on the value of the articles they have
brought to raise a present supply upon. They are a small gold chain and
a 'Forget me not' ring: the girl's property, for they are both too small
for the mother; given her in better times; prized, perhaps, once, for the
giver's sake, but parted with now without a struggle; for want has
hardened the mother, and her example has hardened the girl, and the
prospect of receiving money, coupled with a recollection of the misery
they have both endured from the want of it--the coldness of old
friends--the stern refusal of some, and the still more galling compassion
of others--appears to have obliterated the consciousness of
self-humiliation, which the idea of their present situation would once
have aroused.

In the next box, is a young female, whose attire, miserably poor, but
extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold, but extravagantly fine, too plainly
bespeaks her station. The rich satin gown with its faded trimmings, the
worn-out thin shoes, and pink silk stockings, the summer bonnet in
winter, and the sunken face, where a daub of rouge only serves as an
index to the ravages of squandered health never to be regained, and lost
happiness never to be restored, and where the practised smile is a
wretched mockery of the misery of the heart, cannot be mistaken. There
is something in the glimpse she has just caught of her young neighbour,
and in the sight of the little trinkets she has offered in pawn, that
seems to have awakened in this woman's mind some slumbering recollection,
and to have changed, for an instant, her whole demeanour. Her first
hasty impulse was to bend forward as if to scan more minutely the
appearance of her half-concealed companions; her next, on seeing them
involuntarily shrink from her, to retreat to the back of the box, cover
her face with her hands, and burst into tears.

There are strange chords in the human heart, which will lie dormant
through years of depravity and wickedness, but which will vibrate at last
to some slight circumstance apparently trivial in itself, but connected
by some undefined and indistinct association, with past days that can
never be recalled, and with bitter recollections from whic