my heart was
disturbance and unseemly effeminacy. There was only one individual,
besides myself, walking in the narrow court-yard, which, but for our
footsteps, would have been as silent as a grave. This was a woman--a
beggar--carrying, as usual, a child, that drew less sustenance than sorrow
from the mother's breast. She was in rags, but she looked clean, and she
might once have been beautiful; but settled trouble and privation had
pressed upon her hollow eye--had feasted on her bloomy skin. I could not
tell her age. With a glance I saw that she was old in suffering. And what
was her business here? For whom did _she_ wait? Was it for the father of
that child?--and was she so satisfied of her partner's innocence, and the
justice of mankind, that here she lingered to receive him, assured of
meeting him again? What was his crime?--his character?--her history? I
would have given much to know, indeed, I was about to question her, when I
was startled and detained by the drawing of a bolt--the opening of the
door--and the appearance of the very man whom I had come to see. He did
not perceive me. He perceived nothing but the mother and the child--_his_
wife and _his_ child. She ran to him, and sobbed on his bosom. He said
nothing. He was calm--composed; but he took the child gently from her
arms, carried the little thing himself to give her ease, and walked on.
She at his side, weeping ever; but he silent, and not suffering himself to
speak, save when a word of tenderness could lull the hungry child, who
cried for what the mother might not yield her. Still without a specific
object, I followed the pair, and passed with them into the most ancient
and least reputable quarter of the city. They trudged from street to
street, through squalid courts and lanes, until I questioned the propriety
of proceeding, and the likelihood of my ever getting home again. At
length, however, they stopped. It was a close, narrow, densely peopled
lane in which they halted. The road was thick with mud and filth; the
pavement and the doorways of the houses were filled with ill-clad sickly
children, the houses themselves looked forbidding and unclean. The
bread-stealer and his wife were recognised by half a dozen coarse women,
who, half intoxicated, thronged the entrance to the house opposite to
that in which they lodged, and a significant laugh and nod of the head
were the greetings with which they received the released one back again.
There was little h