her,--no friend to stand between her and the man who
thus robbed her. A resort to law were futile. What had she wherewith to
pay either lawyer or magistrate? and was not continued employment a
necessity? All these thoughts must have flashed across her mind. But in
the terrible silence which she kept for some minutes, still standing at
the counter, how many others must have succeeded them! What happy images
of former comfort came knocking at her heart! what an agonizing sense of
present destitution! what a contrast between the brightness of the one
and the gloom of the other! and then the cries of hungry children
ringing importunately in her ears! I noticed her all the time, and,
child that I was, did so merely because she stood still and made no
reply,--utterly unconscious that emotions of any kind were racking her
grief-smitten heart. I felt no such emotions myself,--how should I
suppose that they had even an existence?

She made no answer to the man who had thus wantonly outraged her, but,
turning to my mother, looked up into her face as if for pity and advice.
Were they not equally helpless victims on the altar of a like domestic
necessity, and should not common trials knit them together in the bonds
of a common sympathy? A new sadness came over her yet beautiful
countenance; but no tear gushed gratefully to relieve her
swelling heart. She took up the money,--I saw that her hand was
trembling,--placed it in her purse, lifted from the counter a bundle
containing a second dozen of vests, and, bidding my mother a graceful
farewell, left the scene of this cruel imposition on one utterly
powerless either to prevent it or to obtain redress. I have never
forgotten the incident.

These labors of my mother were at no time necessary to the support of
the family; but, though quiet and retiring in her habits, she had
ambitious aspirations for supplying herself with pocket-money by the
work of her own hands. As I said before, she was a beautiful sewer on
the finest kinds of work, such as, if obtained from the families in
which it is worn, would have yielded her remunerative wages. But we
lived away beyond the thickly settled portion of the city, had no
influential acquaintances from whom it could be procured, and hence my
mother, with thousands who were really necessitous, resorted to the
tailors, to the meanest as well as to the honorable. When my father
heard of the indignities they practised on us, and of the shamefully low