ng but sympathies
wherewith to answer the poor woman's prayer--a prayer that echoes
through so many hearts in this great city--"May the Lord spare my Archy
from the bad boys, and from taking to the ways of his father!"

There is one thing which strikes me as very affecting in the condition
of any child. It is when that condition is necessarily a melancholy
one--when the circumstances which hem it around cast over the surface of
that young life an abiding gloom. A melancholy child! What an anomaly
among the harmonies of the universe; something as incongruous as a bird
drooping in a cage, or a flower in a sepulchre. The musical laughter
muffled and broken; the spontaneous smile transformed to a sad
suspicion; and the austerities of mature life, the fearful speculation,
and forecast of evil, fixed and frozen on a boy's face! And then the
sorrow of a child is so _absorbing_--for he lives only in the present.
In the afflictions which fall upon him, man has the aid of reason and
faith--he looks beyond the present issue, he detects the significance of
his calamity, and strengthened thus a brave heart can vanquish any
sorrow. But, as Richter beautifully says--"the little cradle, or
bed-canopy of the child, is easier darkened than the starry heaven of
man." Surely, then, it is a blessed thing to contribute aught that will
lighten this gloom, and place the child in natural conditions.

But there is one phase of this subject which, in its appeal to us, is
more eloquent than all the rest. It is where there are children who
stand not merely in the intrinsic claim of their childhood; or in their
touching sadness; or pushing their energies into vice and crime; but
nobly struggling _against_ the tide of evil--struggling to bear up in
their lot--enduring and achieving for the sake of those who, young as
these children are, are dependent on them. If I had time, I think I
could write a "Martyrology;" not following the track of famous men,
whose faces look out upon us from the brutal amphitheatre and from the
fire with a halo of glory around them, and whom we behold, by the vision
of faith, with their gory robes transfigured to celestial whiteness,
waving palms in their hands; but tracing out incidents in the lives of
some of the children here in our city--not dead, but _living_ martyrs!
O! I think I _could_ write such a Martyrology, with blood and tears,
over many a gloomy threshold, on the walls of many a desolate room; and
let future g