he spoke.

"This may seem a strange time to choose, but I have something to say to
you. Will you listen to me?"

She took her handkerchief from her eyes, and gazed at him with a
wondering, grave sort of look, as a child might do. His voice had
something so very remarkable in it.

He passed to the side where she was standing, and said, "I am a very,
very poor man, and I have a helpless mother entirely dependent upon me
for support, and, if it were my last morsel of bread, ay, and wife and
children were perishing for want of it, it is _she_ who should have it."

She only looked at him wondering like.

"This is a fearful precipice upon which you stand. That poor creature
has sunk into the gulf which yawns beneath your feet. May God, in his
mercy, look upon her! But you, beautiful as one of heaven's angels--as
yet pure and sinless as a child--must you fall, sink, perish, in this
mass of loathsome corruption? Better starve, better die--far, far
better."

"Alas, alas!" she cried, with a scared and terrified look, "Alas! alas!
ten hundred thousand times better. Oh, what must I do? what must I do?"

"Take up your cross: venture upon the hardships of a poor man's wife.
Discard all the prides, and pomps, and vanities--the vain, vain
delusions of flattery: trample upon the sin, triumph over the
temptation. Put yourself under the protection of an honest man, who
loves you from his soul. Starve, if it must be, but die the death of the
righteous and pure."

She gazed at him, amazed; she did not yet understand him.

"Marry _me_. Come to my blessed, my excellent mother's roof. It is
homely, but it is honest; and let us labor and suffer together, if need
be. It is all I can offer you, but it will save you."

The arms, the beautiful arms were expanded, as it were, in a very agony
of joy. The face! oh, was it not glorious in its beauty then! Did he
ever forget it?

And so the contract was sealed, and so she was rescued from the pit of
destruction into which she was rapidly sinking.

And this it was that had excited such impassioned, such lasting, such
devoted feelings of gratitude to Him who rules the course of this world,
in a heart which had only to be shown what was good to embrace it.

Fisher was all he had said; extremely poor. His salary, as assistant,
was handsome, nevertheless. He received one hundred a year and his board
from the gentleman with whom he was; but his dress, which was
necessarily rather expensive, an