but fatal cup. Poor Nelly, left without any care or teaching,
soon forgot all she had ever learned; and running wild with the
neglected children around her, became, as might have been expected, a
little street Arab, full of shrewd, quick observation, and utter
aversion to restraint of any kind.

Suddenly, to Nelly's consternation, her father brought home a second
wife, a comrade's widow, with two or three young children. In the new
household Nelly was at once expected to take the place of nurse and
general drudge, a part for which her habits of unrestrained freedom
and idleness had thoroughly disqualified her; and the results were
what might have been expected. There was a good deal of heedlessness
and neglect on Nelly's part, and nearly constant scolding on that of
her new mother. And as the latter was neither patient nor judicious,
and was, moreover, unreasonable in what she demanded from the child,
there was many a conflict ending in sharp blows, the physical pain of
which was nothing in comparison with the sense of injury and
oppression left on the child's mind. But she had no redress; for her
father being so much away from his home, had no opportunity of
opposing, as he would probably have done, his wife's severe method of
"managing" his motherless child.

Things were in this condition when Mrs. Connor, who had formerly
belonged to Ashleigh, made up her mind to remove thither, in the
expectation both of living more cheaply, and of being able, among her
old acquaintances, to find more work to eke out her uncertain means of
living. Her husband was now working on a steamboat which passed up and
down the river on which Ashleigh was situated, so that he could not
see his family as often as before. They were now settled in a small,
rather dilapidated tenement, with a potato patch and pig-sty; and Mrs.
Connor, who was an energetic woman, had already succeeded in making
her family almost independent of the earnings which Michael Connor too
often spent in the public-house. This being the case, she had no
scruples in providing for her own children, without much consideration
for Nelly; so that the poor child was a forlorn-looking object when
Miss Preston had found her hovering wistfully about, attracted by the
sight of the children streaming towards the church, and had induced
her to come, for the first time in her life, into a Sunday school.

And now, with these three girls before her, differing so much in
circumstances