seem
Like broken clouds, or like the stream,
That, smiling, left the mountain-brow
As though its waters ne'er could sever,
Yet, ere it reach the plain below,
Breaks into floods that part forever."

NEEDLE AND GARDEN.

THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
STRAWBERRY-GIRL.

WRITTEN BY HERSELF.

CHAPTER V.

I imagine, that, if one went into any of the numerous places, in this or
any other city, where numbers of women are assembled as workers, or to
any of the charitable institutions where orphan children are taken in
and cared for, and were to institute a general examination of the
inmates as to their personal history, he would find few of them but had
experiences to relate of a kind to make the heart ache. From my own
incidental inquiry and observation of these classes, it would appear
that they afford representatives of every phase of domestic and
pecuniary suffering. I read of kindred sufferings which occasionally
happen to the high-born and wealthy, but here I have come in personal
contact with those in humble life to whom such trials seem to be a
perpetual inheritance.

In our factory there was one operator on a machine with whom I never
could gain an acquaintance beyond the usual morning salutation which
passed between most of us as we came in to our daily employment. To me
she was reserved and taciturn, and it was evident that there was no
disposition on her part to be sociable. But somehow she fell in with my
sister's gay, open, and prepossessing manner, and there grew up a sort
of passionate intimacy between them that I could not account for, as she
was much older than Jane. When we stopped work at noon, they always
dined together by themselves, in a corner of the room, and a close and
incessant conversation was carried on between them, for an hour at a
time, as if they had been lovers. There must have been great mutual
outpourings of confidence, for my sister soon became acquainted with the
minutest particulars of her new friend's singular life.

This woman's name was Vane. Who her father was no one knew but her
mother. When a child, she had lived with the latter in what was at that
time the remains of a wooden hut, that must have been among the very
first buildings erected in the forest which covered the northwestern
portion of what is now the suburbs of the great city around us. In this
little obscure home the two lived entirely alone. They had