"To get to the child, or to send to him, was quite impossible,
and for days they were in complete ignorance about him. At
length, a letter came; and in it the nurse declared that
unless they should immediately send her, in advance-payment, a
certain sum of money, she would altogether abandon Angelo. It
seemed, at first, impossible to forward the money, the road
was so insecure, and the bearer of any parcel was so likely
to be seized by one party or the other, and to be treated as
a spy. But finally, after much consideration, the sum was sent
to the address of a physician, who had been charged with the
care of the child. I think it did reach its destination, and
for a while answered the purpose of keeping the wretched woman
faithful to her charge."

AQUILA AND RIETI.

Extracts from Margaret's and Ossoli's letters will guide us more into
the heart of this home-tragedy, so sanctified with holy hope, sweet
love, and patient heroism. They shall be introduced by a passage from
a journal written many years before.

"My Child! O, Father, give me a bud on my tree of life, so scathed
by the lightning and bound by the frost! Surely a being born
wholly of my being, would not let me lie so still and cold in
lonely sadness. This is a new sorrow; for always, before, I have
wanted a superior or equal, but now it seems that only the feeling
of a parent for a child could exhaust the richness of one's soul.
All powerful Nature, how dost thou lead me into thy heart and
rebuke every factitious feeling, every thought of pride, which has
severed me from the Universe! How did I aspire to be a pure flame,
ever pointing upward on the altar! But these thoughts of
consecration, though true to the time, are false to the whole.
There needs no consecration to the wise heart for all is pervaded
by One Spirit, and the Soul of all existence is the Holy of
Holies. I thought ages would pass, before I had this parent
feeling, and then, that the desire would rise from my fulness of
being. But now it springs up in my poverty and sadness. I am well
aware that I ought not to be so happy. I do not deserve to be well
beloved in any way, far less as the mother by her child. I am too
rough and blurred an image of the Creator, to become a bestower of
life. Yet, if I refuse to be anything else than my highest self,
the true