n convey the tone of despair with which that was said. She told me how
the girl had been such a bright little one. 'She was so pretty, sir; and
maybe we flattered her, and made too much of her. And her father, he
thought she ought to learn the dressmakin' trade, but she felt somehow
above it, and she went to be a book-folder downtown. And one day we
missed her till late o' night; and thin the next night it was later, and
at last her father--bless his poor soul!--he said she shouldn't be out
so, and whipt her. And thin she niver came back for three nights, and we
thought, maybe, she's at her work, and has to stay late; and we niver
suspected how it was, when, suddenly, Mrs. Moore came and said as how
Maggy said she was at Mrs. Rooney's--the ould divil--and my husband
wouldn't belave it at all; but I wint and bust open the door wid a
stone, and found _her_--my own child--there wid a lot of men and women;
and I swore at 'em, and the M. P.'s they come and cleared 'em all out,
and there was the last of her. She's niver been an honest woman since,
when she's in liquor. It broke her father's heart. He died the next
Saturday; people said it was some sort of dysentry, but I know it was
this. God help me! And, now, sir (almost fiercely), can't you get me out
of this? All I want is, to sell my shanty, and wid my two little ones,
git away from _her._ I don't care how far!'

"The mother fleeing her daughter. The pretty child becomes a drunken
outcast! So ends many a sad history in our city."

THE DYING SEWING-WOMAN.

"In East Thirty-fourth Street, in a tenement-house, a poor sewing-woman
has lived for the last two years. She had formerly been in very good
circumstances, and her husband, a respectable mechanic, earned a support
for her and her children, until at length he fell into intemperate
drinking. With the appetite for liquor on him, everything that he made
was spent, and he himself was gradually becoming worse and worse. The
poor wife was forced to the hardest work to keep her children and
herself alive. Last winter, in a moment of desperation, the husband put
his name down for a three-years' whaling voyage, and was taken off to
sea, leaving the woman with an old father and three children to care
for. Many a night, the old man says, has the poor creature walked up
from the lower part of the city (some three or four miles) with four
dozen shirts on her back, through snow and wet, and then, without fire