o get strength to sweep those
few boards, and mend those old spreads and curtains. That sort
of self-respect they have, and it is all of pride their many
years of poor-tith has left them.

'And there they sit,--mother and daughter! In the mother,
ninety years have quenched every thought and every feeling,
except an imbecile interest about her daughter, and the sort
of self-respect I just spoke of. Husband, sons, strength,
health, house and lands, all are gone. And yet these losses
have not had power to bow that palsied head to the grave.
Morning by morning she rises without a hope, night by night
she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can
make of the day is to totter three or four times across the
floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder
that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and
weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf,
and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it
in its summer day.

'But can we think of spring, or summer, or anything joyous
or really life-like, when we look at the daughter?--that
bloodless effigy of humanity, whose care is to eke out this
miserable existence by means of the occasional doles of those
who know how faithful and good a child she has been to that
decrepit creature; who thinks herself happy if she can be
well enough, by hours of patient toil, to perform those menial
services which they both require; whose talk is of the price
of pounds of sugar, and ounces of tea, and yards of flannel;
whose only intellectual resource is hearing five or six
verses of the Bible read every day,--"my poor head," she says,
"cannot bear any more;" and whose only hope is the death to
which she has been so slowly and wearily advancing, through
many years like this.

'The saddest part is, that she does _not wish_ for death. She
clings to this sordid existence. Her soul is now so habitually
enwrapt in the meanest cares, that if she were to be lifted
two or three steps upward, she would not know what to do with
life; how, then, shall she soar to the celestial heights?
Yet she ought; for she has ever been good, and her narrow and
crushing duties have been performed with a self-sacrificing
constancy, which I, for one, could never hope to equal.

'While I listened