A WOMAN’S ANGUISH.

“Sitting alone by the window, watching the moonlit street;

Bending my head to listen to the well known sounds of your feet;

I have been wondering, darling, how I could hear the pain,

When I watched with sighs and tear-wet eyes and waited your coming in vain.

“For I know the day approaches when you will tire of me,

When by the door I may watch and wait for the form I will not see;

When the love that is now my heaven, the kisses that make my life,

You will bestow on another, and that other will be your wife.

“You will grow tired of serving, though you do not call it so;

You will long for a love that is pure, the love that we two know.

God knows that I loved you dearly, with a passion strong and pure,

But you will grow tired and leave me though I gave up all for you.

“I was pure as the morning when I first looked upon your face;

I knew I never could reach you, on your high exalted place,

But I looked and loved and worshiped, as a flower might worship a star,

But your eyes shone down on me and you seemed so far, so far.

“And then I knew that you loved me, loved me with all your heart,

But we could not stand at the altar, we were so far apart;

If a star would wed a flower, the star must drop from the sky,

Or the flower, in trying to reach it, would droop on its stalk and die.

“And you said that you loved me dearly, and swore by the heaven above,

That the Lord and all His angels would sanction and bless our love,

And I was weak, not wicked, my love was pure and true,

And sin itself seemed a virtue, when only shared by you.

“We have been happy together, though, under a cloud of sin;

But I know that the day approaches when my chastening will begin.

You have been faithful and tender, but you will not always be,

And I think I had better leave you while your thoughts are kind of me.

“Oh, God! I could never bear it; it would madden my brain, I know;

So while you love me dearly, I think I had better go.

It is sweeter to feel my darling, to know as I fall asleep,

That some one will mourn and miss me, that some one is left to weep.

“That to die as I would in the future, to fall in the street some day,

Unknown, unwept and forgotten, when you have cast me away;

Perhaps the blood of the Savior can wash my garments clean;

Perchance I may drink the water that flows through the pastures green.

“Perchance we may meet in heaven, and walk in the streets above,

With nothing to grieve or part us, since our sinning was all through love.

God says, ‘Love one another,’ and down to the depths of hell

Will he send the soul of a woman, because she loved and fell.

“Perchance if we had never met, I had been spared this last regret,

This endless striving to forget; and yet, I could not bear the pain

Of never seeing you again.

Ah, leave me not, I love but thee; blessing or curse whiche’er thou be;

Oh, be as thou hast been to me, forever and forever.”’

And so in the moonlight he found her, as around her beautiful clay

(Lifeless and pallid as marble, for her spirit had flown away),

The farewell words she had written she held to her cold, white breast,

And the buried blade of a dagger told how she had done the rest.

TALE ONE.
THE DIARY OF A CHICAGO GIRL.

This story is a copy of the diary kept by a wealthy Chicago girl, who was found dead in her room.

“When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy?

What art can wash her guilt away?

“The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom, is—to die.”