"Where have they taken her to?" she asked.
"She is down stairs. So quiet, and peaceful, and happy she looks."
"Could she speak? Oh, if God—if I might but have heard her little voice! Mother, I used to dream of it. May I see her once again—Oh, mother, if I strive very hard, and God is very merciful, and I go to Heaven, I shall not know her—I shall not know my own again—she will shun me as a stranger, and cling to Susan Palmer and to you. Oh woe! Oh woe!" She shook with exceeding sorrow.
In her earnestness of speech she had uncovered her face, and tried to read Mrs. Leigh's thoughts through her looks. And when she saw those aged eyes brimming full of tears, and marked the quivering lips, she threw her arms round the faithful mother's neck, and wept there as she had done in many a childish sorrow, but with a deeper, a more wretched grief. Her mother hushed her on her breast; and lulled her as if she were a baby; and she grew still and quiet.
They sat thus for a long, long time. At last Susan Palmer came up with some tea and bread and butter for Mrs. Leigh. She watched the mother feed her sick, unwilling child, with every fond inducement to eat which she could devise; they neither of them took notice of Susan's presence. That night they lay in each other's arms; but Susan slept on the ground beside them.
They took the little corpse (the little unconscious sacrifice, whose early calling-home had reclaimed her poor, wandering mother), to the hills, which in her life-time she had never seen. They dared not lay her by the stern grandfather in Milne-row church-yard, but they bore her to a lone moorland grave-yard, where long ago the Quakers used to bury their dead. They laid her there on the sunny slope, where the earliest spring-flowers blow.
Will and Susan live at the Upclose Farm. Mrs. Leigh and Lizzie dwell in a cottage so secluded that, until you drop into the very hollow where it is placed, you do not see it. Tom is a schoolmaster in Rochdale, and he and Will help to support their mother. I only know that, if the cottage be hidden in a green hollow of the hills, every sound of sorrow in the whole upland is heard there—every call of suffering or of sickness for help, is listened to by a sad, gentle-looking woman, who rarely smiles (and when she does, her smile is more sad than other people's tears), but who comes out of her seclusion whenever there's a shadow in any household. Many hearts bless Lizzie Leigh, but she—she prays always and ever for forgiveness—such forgiveness as may enable her to see her child once more. Mrs. Leigh is quiet and happy. Lizzie is to her eyes something precious—as the lost piece of silver—found once more. Susan is the bright one who brings sunshine to all. Children grow around her and call her blessed. One is called Nanny. Her, Lizzie often takes to the sunny grave-yard in the up-lands, and while the little creature gathers the daisies, and makes chains, Lizzie sits by a little grave, and weeps bitterly.
STEAM.
How wonderful are the revolutions which steam has wrought in the world! The diamond, we are told, is but pure carbon; and the dream of the alchymist has long been to disentomb the gem in its translucent purity from the sooty mass dug up from the coal-field. But if the visionary has failed to extricate the fair spirit from its earthly cerements, the practical philosopher has produced from the grimy lump a gem, in comparison to which the diamond is valueless—has evoked a Titanic power, before which the gods of ancient fable could not hold their heaven for an hour; a power wielding the thunderbolt of Jove, the sledge of Vulcan, the club of Hercules; which takes to itself the talaria of Mercury, the speed of Iris, and the hundred arms of Briareus. Ay, the carbon gives us, indeed, the diamond after all; the white and feathery vapor that hisses from the panting tube, is the priceless pearl of the modern utilitarian. Without steam man is nothing—a mere zoological specimen—Lord Monboddo's ape, without the caudal elongation of the vertebræ. With steam, man is every thing. A creature that unites in himself the nature and the power of every animal; more wonderful than the ornithorhynchus—he is fish, flesh, and fowl. He can traverse the illimitable ocean with the gambolings of the porpoise, and the snort of the whale; rove through the regions of the earth with the speed of the antelope, and the patient strength of the camel; he essays to fly through the air with the steam-wing of the aeronauticon, though as yet his pinions are not well fledged, and his efforts have been somewhat Icarian. And, albeit our own steam aeronavigation is chiefly confined to those involuntary gambols (as Sterne happily called Sancho's blanket tossing), which we now and then take at the instance of an exploding boiler, yet may we have good hope that our grandchildren will be able to "take the wings of the morning," and sip their cup of tea genuine at Pekin. He is more than human, and little less than Divinity. Were Aristotle alive, he would define the genus "homo"—neither as "animal ridens," nor yet "animal sentiens," but "Animal Vaporans." True it is, doubtless, that man alone can enjoy his joke. He hath his laugh, when the monkey can but grin and the ape jabber—his thinking he shares with the dog and the elephant; but who is there that can "get up the steam" but man? "Man," say we, "is an animal that vaporeth!" and we will wager one of Stephenson's patent high-pressure engines again our cook's potato-steamer, that Dr. Whately will affirm our definition.—Dublin University Magazine.