ss every earthly consideration to hold her back from ruin;
stretching out palsied hands to Heaven for help; racked by the fierce
fires of repentance, her tortured soul corroded by remorse, she mourns
passionately but unavailingly.

Oh! there are hours like this in the hidden history of every fallen and
degraded son of Adam, when the scales are removed from the spiritual
eyes, and the sin-stained soul shiveringly beholds the depth to which it
has fallen, and shrinks back appalled at the sight; when the demon has
departed for a season, and evil thoughts and evil influences are cast
out, and, feeling their power returning with repentance, angels come to
minister unto the sorrowing one. Gentle guardians are there, who have
watched it all its life through, striven with all the means that lie
within the grasp of a spirit's power to stay it on its downward course
and bring the lost soul back. Ah! 'Love's labor lost.' Ineffectual these
oft-repeated efforts _may_ be, ineffectual through all time they
doubtless will be; but who shall say in the 'land of the undying' that
the work of ministering love shall not continue? What man is that, that
in an hour like this can look upon his brother, prostrate in spirit,
racked with remorse, no matter how vile and polluted, and can say
anguish like this shall be that soul's undying portion in the long
hereafter; that God's justice requires infinite punishment for a finite
crime; that, when freed from its earthly body, the ears of the
All-Compassionate shut out that soul's despairing cry for pardon? Who
shall limit infinite mercy? Who shall set bounds to Divine compassion,
or think that, toiling painfully and slowly up the endless heights of
progression, there shall not be a time away onward in the solemn future,
hidden in the dim mists of ages yet to come, when that soul shall be
cleansed from its pollution, freed from its mourning, sin entirely cast
out, and God shall be all and in all?

The light breeze, as it sways the loose heavy tresses, wafts to her ear
a strain of distant music. All the drowsy afternoon it has been playing,
lost almost entirely at first in the busy hum of the streets and in the
long lull of the lazy wind--a strain only caught at rare intervals when
the breeze is strong enough to bear it to her. It has been slowly
approaching as the hours creep on, advancing a few steps at a time.
Ballads and simple ditties, dances, waltzes, grand old marches! with
that unaccountable