AGGIE WOULD SING
and play for the young gentlemen in the evenings! But one set after another of young men came and went, and Aggie was unmarried at twenty-six, for bless you Sir, you know boarding-house flirts, as a rule, don’t marry. Meanwhile drinking habits had grown on the mother, an inferior class of boarders came to the house. In an evil hour for herself Aggie became engaged to marry a handsome well-bred and well educated cadet of a rich Lancashire family, cotton manufacturers, whose trade brand is known through the world. Horace B⸺ had been at Oxford for a few terms. A subaltern in a militia regiment which he had to leave, a clerk in the Civil Service, finally he was shipped off to Canada. He married Aggie and was a shiftless, reckless, drunken husband! Through him Aggie became addicted to drink, and her mother lost house and home. After many migrations they sought refuge in the Teraulay street tenement, where I found the dead baby. Two days later I renewed my visit. All trace of Aggie and her husband was lost, on a pine table the sole article of furniture in the room, lay the dead baby, purple with decomposition partly covered by a scanty rag! I learned from the people of the next house that a drinking debauch had taken place, the participants in which after hurling the furniture at each others’ heads, threw the baby out of the rear window into the yard! I at once procured decent christian sepulture for this child of sin and misery.