Up, up, up till you reached the very topmost room in a rickety building in —— street, and there they were—a woman in neat but coarse raiment, seated by a flickering candle, stitching for the life, and with every effort for the life, stitching out the life. Near her, on a lowly bed, lay her suffering husband, watching the wan fingers as they busily plied for him who would fain have spent his last strength for their rest.

The frosty breath of a December night came through the chinks in the roof, and around the windows, and left its bitter impress upon the sick and weary. A few coals partially ignited, seemed to mock at the visions of warmth and comfort they inspired, and the simmering of the kettle that hung low over the coals, made the absence of a cheery board, and a happy group around it only the more painfully apparent.

The sick man closed his eyes, as if to shut out the memory of those wasted fingers that were ever so zealously moving, and then looking wistfully at the murmuring kettle, he said, "Has not the child come yet, Mary?—perhaps she has enough for our scanty meal to-night, and yet my heart misgives me on her account—is it not very late for her to stay away? She is such a timid little thing, and always flies to us before the darkness begins to come! Her's is a cruel age, and a loathsome employment. Would God I had died, Mary, ere it had come to this!"—and the poor man hid his face in the bedclothes, and moaned like a stricken child. The patient wife laid aside her work, and taking the well-worn Bible from its sacred resting-place, read to him the thirty-seventh Psalm—then rising and going to the window, she pressed her ear against the pane, and listened for her Jennie's coming. Hark! a step is on the stairs! The husband and wife both started—it was a heavy, lumbering tread—not the soft foot-falls of their gentle little one, that brought music even to their dismal abode:

"Some one is knocking, Mary," said the husband, and, as he spoke, the door opened, and a man appeared with a note and a basket.

"Is Mrs. Grig here," asked the man.

"That is my name," replied the frightened woman whose maternal heart immediately suggested that something had happened to her child.

"Tell me of my darling. Is she hurt? Is she dead?"—then seizing the note which the servant held out to her she read as follows:

"I send a few delicacies, which I hope her sick father will relish. Jennie wishes to see her mother before she sleeps, will she come to her an hour this evening?"

The servant left the name of the street, and the number of the house where his mistress lived, and departed, with an humble reverence, for there was an innate aristocracy in Mrs. Grig that commanded the respect of all who saw her, even though the vicissitudes of life had robbed her of the external marks of rank and elegance. "God be praised!" said she, as she pressed her lips to the pale brow of her now hopeful husband, "Our house is not left unto us desolate, neither has our Father forsaken us in our time of necessity. Surely He giveth bread to the hungry, and filleth the fainting soul with gladness!" Then spreading the tempting viands before the famished invalid, she smiled with the cheerfulness of her earlier days, as she saw with what relish he ate and drank.

When they had finished their unexpected, but welcome meal, she placed the fragments carefully away, and blowing out the light, which she must save for her midnight toils, she left the house in order to seek her child.