"Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love;
Hearts that the world has vainly tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquillity!
A something light as air, a look,
A word unkind, or wrongly taken,—
Oh, love that tempests never shook,
A breath, a touch like this hath shaken!
For ruder words will soon rush in
To spread the breach that words begin,
And eyes forget the gentle ray
They wore in courtship's smiling day,
And voices lose the tone which shed
A tenderness round all they said,—
Till, fast declining, one by one,
The sweetnesses of love are gone,
And hearts so lately mingled seem
Like broken clouds, or like the stream,
That, smiling, left the mountain-brow
As though its waters ne'er could sever,
Yet, ere it reach the plain below,
Breaks into floods that part forever."
NEEDLE AND GARDEN.
THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A STRAWBERRY-GIRL.
WRITTEN BY HERSELF.
CHAPTER V.
I imagine, that, if one went into any of the numerous places, in this or any other city, where numbers of women are assembled as workers, or to any of the charitable institutions where orphan children are taken in and cared for, and were to institute a general examination of the inmates as to their personal history, he would find few of them but had experiences to relate of a kind to make the heart ache. From my own incidental inquiry and observation of these classes, it would appear that they afford representatives of every phase of domestic and pecuniary suffering. I read of kindred sufferings which occasionally happen to the high-born and wealthy, but here I have come in personal contact with those in humble life to whom such trials seem to be a perpetual inheritance.
In our factory there was one operator on a machine with whom I never could gain an acquaintance beyond the usual morning salutation which passed between most of us as we came in to our daily employment. To me she was reserved and taciturn, and it was evident that there was no disposition on her part to be sociable. But somehow she fell in with my sister's gay, open, and prepossessing manner, and there grew up a sort of passionate intimacy between them that I could not account for, as she was much older than Jane. When we stopped work at noon, they always dined together by themselves, in a corner of the room, and a close and incessant conversation was carried on between them, for an hour at a time, as if they had been lovers. There must have been great mutual outpourings of confidence, for my sister soon became acquainted with the minutest particulars of her new friend's singular life.
This woman's name was Vane. Who her father was no one knew but her mother. When a child, she had lived with the latter in what was at that time the remains of a wooden hut, that must have been among the very first buildings erected in the forest which covered the northwestern portion of what is now the suburbs of the great city around us. In this little obscure home the two lived entirely alone. They had neighbors, of course, but none of them could tell how they contrived to subsist. The mother did no work, except for herself and her child; she had but a small garden in front of the house, the embellishment of which was her particular care; and she was surrounded with books, in the reading of which she spent all her leisure time, having little intercourse with her neighbors. The gossips that exist everywhere in society, if curious about her affairs, could discover nothing as to how she lived so comfortably without any visible means.