A pale, wan woman, with a young girl by her side, walked quickly along Chatham street, just as the twilight was deepening into darkness. She was very thinly clad, her light shawl was only a covering—it was no protection from the keen autumn air. It had once been an elegant and fashionable silk, but its fashion had long since passed away. It had been colored and colored again, until its substance had well-nigh disappeared. Her straw bonnet had been renovated many times, but not for a long time, and its faded ribbon was passed plainly over the crown, for it would have been mockery to make such ribbon into bows. Every thing that covered this young creature was passing away, and as she entered a pawn-broker’s shop, you might have seen by the light of the lamp that fell on her face, that she, too, was passing from a world that had given her small welcome, at least for many years. It would have been a comfort to any benevolent person, who had looked into that pale face, to have seen the red spot on one of her cheeks, and to have heard her cough.

What had she to do in a world so cold, with that miserable shawl to wrap around her ulcerated lungs, that smarted like fire with every breath of cold air they inhaled. She might as well have wrapped herself in cobwebs, as in clothes such as hers.

She went into the shop, her poor, little, shadowy child clung close to her mother. She had little knowledge of the place or the people, though she had many times been there, but she knew that after many tears, her mother went there, and then that for a brief space they had food.

The poor lady took from her pocket two miniature pictures—the golden setting had been removed sometime before. They were by a master’s hand, worth at least one hundred dollars each, and infinitely precious to her, being the likenesses of her father and mother.

“What will you give me for these?” said she, trembling in every nerve as she spoke.

The hard money-getting son of Israel, whose trade was pawn-broking, and whose business made him look on misery three hundred and thirteen days in the year, answered, “They are worth nothing to me, madam.”

The lady shrunk into herself as if she had been shriveled. Her face and lips became deadly pale. She supported herself against the side of the box in which she stood, to conceal herself from view; and her little girl held her hand and clung to her garments in great fear. Very soon she began to cough, and in a moment her thin, tattered, white handkerchief was saturated with the blood she raised.

The Jew looked at her with a mingling of kindness and fear. She must not bleed to death there. The pictures he knew were of much value, though there was a good deal of risk in taking them. He pitied the bleeding woman. Yet, pawn-broker and Jew as he was, he pitied her.

“I will give you four dollars on them,” said he, and he hastily ticketed them, and handed her the money, to her infinite relief. She felt that she and her child had now a reprieve from death. The Jew selected some bills that bore a discount of ten per cent., and yet he pitied the woman, and she was so grateful to him that she could have pressed his hand, and wept hot tears upon it. She hurried away to her attic in Frankfort street. It was dark, and she feared insult. New York was worse lighted and worse cared for then than now. We had no gas and no star police then, but we had plenty of Jews and pawn-broker’s shops.

As she passed along she raised the blood that pressed into her throat as fast as possible, but still it almost strangled her. Well-dressed people, men of business, returning home, and men and women hurrying to the theatre, the concert-room, or the prayer-meeting, or to the varied business or amusement of life, passed her without notice. She was their sister, but how were they to know that she was dying—that her scanty life-current was staining the pavement on which they stepped.

She reached the last landing-place, and thought that she could go no further, but it was not seemly to die there, and she made a last effort and entered her room. She was startled by a bright light in the room—light at night she had not had since she made the last dozen of shirts at ten cents a piece. Stranger still, there was a good, bright fire in the grate. Her husband stood before it, with his face toward the door, and his hands behind him, showily dressed as usual. She had not seen him for many days.

“O, Edward!” said she, “I am so glad you are come”—and she fainted, and would have fallen to the floor if he had not caught her in his arms. He laid her upon the meagre bed that had long since been robbed of every valuable article for the pawn-broker.

“Fanny,” said he, with a choking voice, “my poor Fanny!” He sprinkled water on her face, and she opened her eyes.

“I am going, Edward,” said she.

“No, no!—you will not die now. O, don’t die till you have forgiven me for being your mur—”

“Don’t say that—I forgive as I would be forgiven. Our child—”

A hard fit of coughing and copious bleeding hindered her from speaking for some time.

“Our poor Marie—give her to your Cousin Charles; he has wealth and none to care for. Promise me that you will do this.”

The husband, trembling with fear, gave her the required promise, when she strangled from an excessive rush of blood into the trachea, and died with her daughter clinging madly around her neck.

Edward Evans, the gambler and man about town, was alone with his dead wife, who, fourteen years before, he had persuaded to elope from her parents, and to marry him. She had gone through every gradation of suffering and poverty, and but for a strange run of luck that he had had for two or three evenings, she would have died in that dark, cold room, alone with her child, and have been buried in Potter’s Field. As it was, Evans had a basket of coal, a pound of candles, some food, and money to buy his wife a grave. And wretched as he was, we must do him the justice to say that he was glad to be able to bury his wife decently. And he did it.

And now he bethought him of her last request. He must make the effort to give away the child, who had clung to the corpse of her mother to the last moment, and who had not seemed to see or hear at all, since that mother was buried out of her sight.

——