ur.

There's a woman at another window, writing, or rather she has got her
table before her, and her inkstand, and the pen between her fingers;
all that she wants is a few ideas; see, she rolls up her eyes like a
pussy in a fit, and looks _up_, and looks _down_, and makes a love knot
on the paper with her pen, and coaxes her temples with her fingers; but
it's no use, there's nothing _there_! So she may as well get off her
stilts and darn her stockings.

There are two little girls at another window playing with their
dollies. Now I like that--it's a good thing--it teaches them how to
sew, and to cut out little garments, and to contrive and fix up things,
so that when they have _live_ dollies it will come handy to cut out
_their_ frocks. I always like to see little girls play with dollies,
and big girls, too, if they want to; it is better than a novel; better
than a thousand other things that girls do now-a-days, who fancy
themselves ladies as soon as they twist up their ringlets with a comb.
Heigh-ho, it makes me sigh to think there are so few _children_ in
1853.

Over there at another window in the same block, is a very sad sight. A
drunken husband! See how patiently his poor wife is trying to coax him
not to go out. She is fearful he may fall in the street, and get hurt,
and then she feels ashamed to have him seen in such a plight; now she
gently removes his hat--then he puts it on again; now her arm is about
his neck--but only to have it rudely pushed aside, poor woman. I hope
she believes in God, and knows how to _lean_ upon Him.

Now her husband has gone, and she sits down and covers her face with
her hands, and weeps. They are bitter tears--she thinks of the time he
took her proudly away from a happy home, and promised she should be
dear to him as his own life blood. Perhaps she cannot go to that home
_now_--perhaps her father and mother (happily for them) have not lived
to see her joy so soon turned to sorrow; or, if she could go there, she
loves her husband still too much to leave him. She hopes each morning
that he will come home and love her at night--and she tidies up the
hearth, and makes the fire bright, and keeps his supper warm, and wipes
away her tears, and braids her hair in shining plaits as he once loved
to see it, and looks often at the little mantel clock, and then out the
window. By and by she hears his step; oh, it is the same old story--he
reels, cursing, into her presence--perhaps aims at her