Look there! tread softly: angels are near us. Through the grated window the light streams faintly upon a little pallet, where, sweet as a dream of heaven, lies a sleeping babe! Over its cherub face a smile is flitting. The cell has no other occupant; angels only watch the slumbers of the prison-cradled. The place is holy. I stoop to kiss its forehead. From the crowd of women pacing up and down the guarded gallery, one glides gently to my side, saying, half proudly, half sadly, “’Tis my babe.”
“It is so sweet, and pure, and holy,” said I.
The mother’s lip quivered; wiping away a tear with her apron, she said, in a choking voice:
“Ah, it is little the likes of you, ma’am, know how hard it is for us to get the honest bread!”
God be thanked, thought I, that there is one who “judgeth not as man judgeth;” who holdeth evenly the scales of justice; who weigheth against our sins the whirlpool of our temptations, who forgetteth never the countless struggles for the victory, ere the desponding, weary heart shuts out the light of Heaven.
MRS. ZEBEDEE SMITH’S PHILOSOPHY.
Dear me! how expensive it is to be poor. Every time I go out, my best bib and tucker has to go on. If Zebedee were worth a cool million, I might wear a coal-hod on my head, if I chose, with perfect impunity. There was that old nabob’s wife at the lecture, the other night, in a dress that might have been made for Noah’s great grandmother. She can afford it! Now, if it rains knives and forks, I must sport a ten dollar hat, a forty dollar dress, and a hundred dollar shawl. If I go to a concert, I must take the highest priced seat, and ride there and back, just to let “Tom, Dick and Harry” see that I can afford it. Then, we must hire the most expensive pew in the broad-aisle of a tip-top church, and give orders to the sexton not to admit any strangers into it who look snobbish. Then my little children, Napoleon Bonaparte and Donna Maria Smith, can’t go to a public school, because, you know, we shouldn’t have to pay anything.
Then, if I go shopping, to buy a paper of needles, I have to get a little chap to bring them home, because it wouldn’t answer for me to be seen carrying a bundle through the streets. We have to keep three servants, where one might do; and Zebedee’s coats have to be sent to the tailor when they need a button sewed on, for the look of the thing.