ind me out, the child was an incumbrance I had no
means of supporting. I parted with her--yes, yes, I parted with her to
Mother Bridges, who kept a stand at a corner in West street--"

"And then what became of her?" again interposes Madame Montford. The
woman assumes a sullenness, and it is some time before she can be got to
proceed.

"My conscience rebuked me," she resumes, as if indifferent about
answering the question, "for I loved the child as my own; and the friend
I lived with, and who followed the sea, printed on its right arm two
hearts and a broken anchor, which remain there now. My husband died of
the cholera, and the friend I had taken to, and who treated me kindly,
also died, and I soon found myself an abandoned woman, an outcast--yes,
ruined forever, and in the streets, leading a life that my own feelings
revolted at, but from which starvation only seemed the alternative. My
conscience rebuked me again and again, and something--I cannot tell what
it was--impelled me with an irresistible force to watch over the
fortunes of the child I knew must come to the same degraded life
necessity--perhaps it was my own false step--had forced upon me. I
watched her a child running neglected about the streets, then I saw her
sold to Hag Zogbaum, who lived in Pell street; I never lost sight of
her--no, I never lost sight of her, but fear of criminating myself kept
me from making myself known to her. When I had got old in vice, and
years had gone past, and she was on the first step to the vice she had
been educated to, we shared the same roof. Then she was known as Anna
Bonard--"

"Anna Bonard!" exclaims Madame Montford. "Then truly it is she who now
lives in Charleston! There is no longer a doubt. I may seek and claim
her, and return her to at least a life of comfort."

"There you will find her. Ah, many times have I looked upon her, and
thought if I could only save her, how happy I could die. I shared the
same roof with her in Charleston, and when I got sick she was kind to
me, and watched over me, and was full of gentleness, and wept over her
condition. She has sighed many a time, and said how she wished she knew
how she came into the world, to be forced to live despised by the world.
But I got down, down, down, from one step to another, one step to
another, as I had gone up from one step to another in the splendor of
vice, until I found myself, tortured in mind and body, a poor neglected
wretch in the Charleston Poo