The ball ended towards the small hours of the morning, and the clatter of carriages dashing up to the door of the mansion, gave the signal to the guests that it was time to depart. No one had seen the odd-looking bundle that lay on the street steps, half buried in the snow, and which might have lain there until the morning had not some one stumbled over it in descending to the carriages. With a half curse, one of the men stooped down to examine the strange object, and found that the bundle of rags and filth contained the unconscious form of a child. The harp, which lay beside him, told his story. He was one of the little outcasts of the streets. Scorning to handle such an object, the man touched him with his foot to arouse him, thinking he had fallen asleep. Alas! it was the eternal sleep.
A SAD STORY.
Mr. Nathan D. Urner, from whose interesting paper in Packard's Monthly we have already quoted, draws the following touching picture of minstrel life:
A horrible murder had been committed. All engaged in it, including the victim, were foreigners. There was not a redeeming feature, not even the rather equivocal one of passion's frenzy, connected with the deed. It was deliberate, long-concerted, mercenary, atrocious, and bloody. The murderers—there were two—were shortly afterwards arrested; tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, with a dispatch and inexorableness which—probably owing to their friendlessness—was somewhat unusual under the statutes of this State. The most affecting incident connected with the condemned—both of them desperate villains—was the parting scene between the Italian criminal (his comrade was a Spaniard) and his child. This was a little girl, scarcely ten years of age; I doubt if she numbered so many. The man was low-browed, narrow-templed, and of a generally brutal, repulsive aspect. They were about to lead him into the dungeon of the condemned, the studded door of which would not open again save to admit his passage to the gallows-tree; and his poor child was beside him. Hardened, sin-stained as he was, the father was himself visibly affected; but the tempest of wild, passionate grief that agitated the little girl, so soon to be left an orphan, was something remarkable in one of her years.
She was evidently a child of the streets. Her dress was ragged and foul, and even her face so unclean as to be barely redeemed by the large, beautiful black eyes which would alone have betrayed the sunny clime of her origin. While the wretched criminal stood, shame-facedly and with drooping crest, before her, she fell upon his manacled hands, kissing them wildly, and betraying in her childish grief all the deep, sensitive, despairing sorrow of a woman. The villain before her might have often beaten her, debased her immeasurably, but the mysterious cord that linked their beating hearts was unbroken, though it sang like a bowstring in the gusty horror that swept between, and stretched to attenuation as the elder spirit sank, groaning, into the abyss of its own wickedness. Hot tears gushed from her eyes, her little throat was swollen with the choking sobs, and her narrow, rag-covered chest heaved with tumultuous agony. But after he was taken away, when the iron door which to her was, indeed, the door of the tomb, had closed between them forever, she became quickly calm, and her face soon wore an air of quiet resignation.
As she was about leaving the court-room she stooped and picked up a weather-stained guitar. I guessed her vocation, and was resolved to speak to her.
'What is your name, little one?'
'Angela, sir.' It was a sad voice, but very sweet.
'And do you play on this for a living?'
'I play and sing also, sir.'