ery--
the bottle.

To do the family justice, it was only the father who had succumbed. He
had been a gentleman; he was now a sot. His wife--delicate owing to bad
treatment, sorrow, and insufficient nourishment--was, ever had been, and
ever would be, a lady and a Christian. Owing to the last priceless
condition she was still alive. It is despair that kills, and despair
had been banished from her vocabulary ever since she had laid down the
arms of her rebellion and accepted the Saviour of mankind as her guide
and consolation.

But sorrow, suffering, toil had not departed when the demon despair fled
away. They had, however, been wonderfully lightened, and one of the
brightest gleams of hope in her sad life was that she might possibly be
used as the means of saving her husband. There were other gleams of
light, however, one of the brightest of them being that May, her only
daughter, was loving and sympathetic--or, as she sometimes expressed it,
"as good as gold." But there was also a very dark spot in her life:
Shank, her only son, was beginning to show a tendency to tread in his
father's steps.

Many golden texts were enshrined in the heart of poor Mrs Leather, and
not a few of these--painted by the hand of May--hung on the walls of
their little sitting-room, but the word to which she turned her eyes in
seasons of profoundest obscurity, and which served her as a sheet-anchor
in the midst of the wildest storms, was, "Hope thou in God, for thou
shalt _yet_ praise Him." And alongside of that text, whenever she
thought of it or chanced to look at it, there invariably flashed
another: "Immanuel, God with us."

May and her mother were alone when the young men entered; the former was
at her lessons, the latter busy with knitting-needles.

Knitting was the means by which Mrs Leather, with constant labour and
inexhaustible perseverance, managed to fill up the gap between the
before-mentioned "two ends," which her dissolute husband failed to draw
together. She could read or assist May with her lessons, while her
delicate fingers, working below the table, performed miraculous
gyrations with steel and worsted. To most male minds, we presume, this
is utterly incomprehensible. It is well not to attempt the description
of that which one does not understand. The good lady knitted socks and
stockings, and mittens and cuffs, and comforters, and other things, in
absolutely overwhelming quantities, so that the accumulation i