rt and home, a something
that darkened and deepened day by day, and grew more and more
insupportable as the weary time crept on. What it was, and how long it
had rested there before he became conscious of its presence, and whether
his miserable home had ever been free from it and ever been a happy one,
little Harry never knew. All his brief life it had lain there. Its
shadow had crept into the violet eyes with the first faint glimmer of
intelligence, and when the new-born soul, mysterious breath of God,
first woke from its mystic dreaming, and looked consciously out upon the
world into which it had come, its baleful presence crept into that holy
sanctuary, and darkened what should have been cloudless as well as
sinless. He had drawn it in with every breath from the atmosphere of the
little world around him; it rested on all he came in contact with, and
gradually and sadly there arose in the mind too immature to comprehend
the cause and the nature of this desolating power, yet feeling vaguely
day by day its blighting effects, sorrowful and earnest
questionings--questionings like the following, to which there came back
no answer to the little, suffering heart:

Why his home (if home it may be called in which the heart finds no
resting place), the four walls that enclosed the place where he ate and
slept, was such a dull, joyless, lonesome spot? What that dark something
was that shadowed its light and took from it all joy and comfort,
causing every face within it to wear a melancholy or forbidding aspect?
Why there was no glad smile even on his father's lips, when he came to
seek the sad young creatures that crept silently to his knee and looked
wistfully up into the care-worn face; and why, though loving and kind,
he was always kind with that sorrowful tenderness which makes sad hearts
the sadder? Why this craving that he feels within him, this
half-undefined, insatiable longing for maternal love and sympathy? What
had sealed from the thirsting heart this purest fountain of earthly
tenderness?

A mother's form was present to him day by day, but where was the
maternal heart of love which should have beat within that bosom? 'Can a
mother forget her children?' There is a fell and terrible destroyer,
which murders peace in hearts and homes, whose very breath is a mildew
and a blight, in whose desolating track follow woe, want, and ruin; a
fierce, insatiable appetite, trebly cursed, that makes of life a
loathsome degradation