The night of a bitter winter day had come; frost, and hail, and snow carried a sense of new desolation to the cold hearths of the moneyless, while the wealthy only drew the closer to their bright fires, and experienced stronger feelings of comfort.

In a small back apartment of a mean house, in one of the poorest quarters of Edinburgh, a young man sat with a pen in his fingers, endeavoring to write, though the blue tint of his nails showed that the blood was almost frozen in his hands. There was no fire in the room; the old iron grate was rusty and damp, as if a fire had not blazed in it for years; the hail dashed against the fractured panes of the window; the young man was poorly and scantily dressed, and he was very thin, and bilious to all appearance; his sallow, yellow face and hollow eyes told of disease, misery, and the absence of hope.

His hand shook with cold, as, by the light of the meanest and cheapest of candles, he slowly traced line after line, with the vain thought of making money by his writings. In his boyish days he had entered the ranks of literature, with the hopes of fame to lead him on, but disappointment after disappointment, and miserable circumstances of poverty and suffering had been his fate: now the vision of fame had become dim in his sick soul—he was writing with the hope of gaining money, any trifle, by his pen.

Of all the ways of acquiring money to which the millions bend their best energies, that of literature is the most forlorn. The artificers of necessaries and luxuries, for the animal existence, have the world as their customers; but those who labor for the mind have but a limited few, and therefore the supply of mental work is infinitely greater than the demand, and thousands of the unknown and struggling, even though possessed of much genius, must sink before the famous few who monopolize the literary market, and so the young writer is overlooked. He may be starving, but his manuscripts will be returned to him; the emoluments of literature are flowing in other channels; he is one added to the thousands too many in the writing world; his efforts may bring him misery and madness, but not money.

The door of the room opened, and a woman entered; and advancing near the little table on which the young man was writing, she fixed her eyes on him with a look in which anger, and the extreme wretchedness which merges on insanity, were mingled. She seemed nearly fifty; her features had some remaining traces of former regularity and beauty, but her whole countenance now was a volume filled with the most squalid suffering and evil passions; her cheeks and eyes were hollow, as if she had reached the extreme of old age; she was emaciated to a woeful degree; her dress was poor dirty, and tattered, and worn without any attempt at proper arrangement.

“Writing! writing! writing! Thank God, Andrew Carson, the pen will soon drop from your fingers with starvation.”

The woman said this in a half-screaming, but weak and broken-down voice.

“Mother, let me have some peace,” said the young writer, turning his face away, so that he might not see her red glaring eyes fixed on him.

“Ay, Andrew Carson, I say thank God that the force of hunger will soon now make you drop that cursed writing. Thank God, if there is the God that my father used to talk about in the long nights in the bonnie highland glen, where it’s like a dream of lang syne that I ever lived.”

She pressed her hands on her breast, as if some recollections of an overpowering nature were in her soul.

“The last rag in your trunk has gone to the pawn; you have neither shirt, nor coat, nor covering now, except what you’ve on. Write—write—if you can, without eating; to-morrow you’ll have neither meat nor drink here, nor aught now to get money on.”

“Mother, I am in daily expectation of receiving something for my writing now; the post this evening may bring me some good news.”

He said this with hesitation, and there was little of hope in the expression of his face.

“Good news! good news about your writing! that’s the good news ’ill never come; never, you good-for-nothing scribbler!”

She screamed forth the last words in a voice of frenzy. Her tone was a mixture of Scotch and Irish accents. She had resided for some years of her earlier life in Ireland.

As the young writer looked at her and listened to her, the pen shook in his hand.

“Go out, and work, and make money. Ay, the working people can live on the best, while you, with that pen in your fingers, are starving yourself and me.”

“Mother, I am not strong enough for labor, and my tastes are strongly, very strongly, for literature.”

“Not strong enough! you’re twenty past. It’s twenty long years since the cursed night I brought you into the world.” The young writer gazed keenly on his mother, for he was afraid she was under the influence of intoxication, as was too often the case; but he did not know how she could have obtained money, as he knew there was not a farthing in the house. The woman seemed to divine the meaning of his looks—

“I’m not drunk, don’t think it,” she cried; “it’s the hunger and the sorrow that’s in my head.”

“Well, mother, perhaps this evening’s post may have some good intelligence.”

“What did the morning’s post bring? There, there—don’t I see it—them’s the bonnie hopes of yours.”

She pointed to the table, where lay a couple of returned manuscripts. Andrew glanced toward the parcel, and made a strong effort to suppress the deep sigh which heaved his breast.

“Ay, there it is—there’s a bundle of that stuff ye spend your nights and days writing; taking the flesh off your bones, and making that face of yours so black and yellow; it’s your father’s face, too—ay—well it’s like him now, indeed—the ruffian. I wish I had never seen him, nor you, nor this world.”

“My father,” said Andrew, and a feeling of interest overspread his bloodless face. “You have told me little of him. Why do you speak of him so harshly?”

“Go and work, and make money, I say. I tell you I must get money; right or wrong, I must get it; there’s no living longer, and enduring what I’ve endured. I dream of being rich; I waken every morning from visions where my hands are filled with money; that wakening turns my head, when I know and see there is not a halfpenny in the house, and when I see you, my son, sitting there, working like a fool with pen and brain, but without the power to earn a penny for me. Go out and work with your hands, I say again, and let me get money—do any thing, if it brings money. There is the old woman over the way, who has a working son; his mother may bless God that he is a shoemaker and not a poet; she is the happy woman, so cozily covered with warm flannel and stuff this weary weather, and her mutton, and her tea, and her money jingling in her pocket forever; that’s what a working son can do—a shoemaker can do that.”

At this some noise in the kitchen called Mrs. Carson away, to the great relief of Andrew. He rose, and closed the door gently after her. He seated himself again, and took up his pen, but his head fell listlessly on his hand; he felt as if his mother’s words were yet echoing in his ears. From his earliest infancy he had regarded her with fear and wonder, more than love.

Mrs. Carson was the daughter of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, who was suspected by his brethren in the ministry of entertaining peculiar views of religion on some points, and also of being at intervals rather unsound in his mind. He bestowed, however, a superior education on his only daughter, and instructed her carefully himself until his death, which occurred when she was not more than fourteen. As her father left her little if any support, she was under the necessity of going to reside with relations in Ireland, who moved in a rather humble rank. Of her subsequent history little was known to Andrew; she always maintained silence regarding his father, and seemed angry when he ventured to question her. Andrew was born in Ireland, and resided there until about his eighth year, when his mother returned to Scotland.

It was from his mother Andrew had gained all the little education that had been bestowed on him. That education was most capriciously imparted, and in its extent only went the length of teaching him to read partially; for whatever further advances he had made he was indebted to his own self-culture. At times his mother would make some efforts to impress on him the advantages of education: she would talk of poetry, and repeat specimens of the poets which her memory had retained from the period of her girlhood in her father’s house; but oftenest the language of bitterness, violence, and execration was on her lips. With the never-ceasing complaints of want—want of position, want of friends, but, most of all, want of money—sounding in his ears, Andrew grew up a poet. The unsettled and aimless mind of his mother, shadowed as it was with perpetual blackness, prevented her from calmly and wisely striving to place her son in some position by which he could have aided in supporting himself and her. As a child, Andrew was shy and solitary, caring little for the society of children of his own years, and taking refuge from the never-ceasing violence of his mother’s temper in the privacy of his own poor bedroom, with some old book which he had contrived to borrow, or with his pen, for he was a writer of verses from an early age.

Andrew was small-sized, sickly, emaciated, and feeble in frame; his mind had much of the hereditary weakness visible in his mother; his imagination and his passions were strong, and easily excited to such a pitch as to overwhelm for the moment his reason. With a little-exercised and somewhat defective judgment; with no knowledge of the world; with few books; with a want of that tact possessed by some intellects, of knowing and turning to account the tendencies of the age in literature, it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet, though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in the way of realizing either fame or emolument.

Now, as he sat with his eyes fixed on the two returned manuscripts on his table, his torturing memory passed in review before him the many times his hopes had been equally lost. He was only twenty years of age, yet he had endured so many disappointments! He shook and trembled with a convulsive agony as he recalled poem after poem, odes, sonnets, epics, dramas—he had tried every thing; he had built so many glorious expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread broadly, and be felt deeply in the world. But there they had all returned to him—there they lay, unknown, unheard of—they were only so much waste paper.

As each manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world’s success would hardly have made him happy; he had no internal strength to cope with disappointment—no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was overwhelmed with present failures. One moment he doubted sorely the power of his own genius: and the thought was like death to him, for without fame—without raising himself a name and a position above the common masses—he felt he could not live. Again, he would lay the whole blame on the undiscerning publishers to whom his poetry had been sent; he would anathematize them all with the fierce bitterness of a soul which was, alas! unsubdued in many respects by the softening and humbling influences of the religion of Christ. He had not the calm reflection which might have told him that, young, uneducated, utterly unlearned in the world and in books as he was, his writings must of necessity have a kind of inferiority to the works of those possessed of more advantages. He had no deep, sober principles or thoughts; his thoughts were feelings which bore him on their whirlwind course to the depths of agony, and to the brink of the grave, for his health was evidently seriously impaired by the indulgence of long-continued emotions of misery.

He took up one of the rejected manuscripts in his hand: it was a legendary poem, modeled something after the style of Byron, though the young author would have violently denied the resemblance. He thought of the pains he had bestowed on it—of the amount of thought and dreams—the sick, languid headaches, the pained breast, the weary mind it had so often occasioned him; then he saw the marks of tears on it—the gush of tears which had come as if to extinguish the fire of madness which had kindled in his brain. When he saw that manuscript returned to him, the marks of the tears were there staining the outside page. He looked fixedly on that manuscript, and his thin face became darker, and more expressive of all that is hopeless in human sorrow; the bright light of success shone as if so far away from him now—away at an endless distance, which neither his strength of body or mind could ever carry him over.

At that moment the sharp, rapid knock of the postman sounded in his ears. His heart leaped up, and then suddenly sank with suffocating fear, for the dark mood of despair was on him—could it be another returned manuscript? He had only one now in the hands of a publisher; the one on which he had expended all his powers—the one to which he had trusted most: it was a tragedy. He had dreamed the preceding night that it had been accepted; he had dreamed it had brought him showers of gold; he had been for a moment happy beyond the bounds of human happiness, though he had awoke with a sense of horror on his mind, he knew not why. The publisher to whom he had sent his tragedy was to present it to the manager of one of the London theatres. Had it been taken, performed, successful?—a dream of glory, as if heaven had opened on him, bewildered his senses.

The door was rudely pushed open; his mother entered, and flung the manuscript of the returned tragedy on the table.

“There—there’s another of them!” she cried, rage choked her voice for a moment.

Andrew was stunned. Despair seemed to have frozen him all at once into a statue. He mechanically took up the packet, and, opening it, he read the cold, polite, brief note, which told of the rejection of his play both by theatres and publishers.

“Idiot—fool—scribbling fool!”

The unfortunate poet’s mother sank into a chair, as if unable to support the force of her anger.

“Fool!—scribbling madman! will ye never give over?”

Andrew made no answer; but every one of his mother’s furious words sank into his brain, adding to the force of his unutterable misery.

“Will ye go now, and take to some other trade, will ye?—will ye, I say?”

Andrew’s lips moved for a moment, but no sound came from them.

“Will ye go out, and make money, I say, at some sensible work? Make money for me, will you? I’ll force you out to make money at some work by which there’s money to be made; not the like of that idiot writing of yours, curse it. Answer me, and tell me you’ll go out and work for money now?”

She seized his arm, and shook it violently; but still he made no response.

“You will not speak. Listen, then—listen to me, I say; I’ll tell it all now; you’ll hear what you never heard before. I did not tell you before, because I pitied you—because I thought you would work for me, and earn money; but you will not promise it. Now, then, listen. You are the very child of money—brought into existence by the influence of money; you would never have been in being had it not been for money. I always told you I was married to your father; I told you a falsehood—he bound me to him by the ties of money only.”

A violent shudder passed over Andrew’s frame at this intelligence, but still he said nothing.

“You shall hear it all—I shall tell you particularly the whole story. It was not for nothing you were always afraid of being called a bastard. It’s an ugly word, but it belongs to you—ay, ay, ye always trembled at that word, since ye were able to go and play among the children in the street. They called ye that seven years ago—ten years ago, when we came here first, and you used to come crying to me, for you could not bear it, you said. I denied it then—I told you I was married to your father; I told you a lie: I told you that, because I thought you would grow up and work for me, and get me money. You won’t do it; you will only write—write all day and all night, too, though I’ve begged you to quit it. You have me here starving. What signifies the beggarly annuity your father left to me, and you, his child? It’s all spent long before it comes, and here we are with nothing, not a crust, in the house, and it’s two months till next paying time.

“Listen—I’ll tell you the whole story of your birth; maybe that will put you from writing for a while, if you have the spirit you used to have when they told you what you were.”

She shook his arm again, without receiving any answer; his head had fallen on his hands, and he remained fixed in one position. His mother’s eyes glared on him with a look in which madness was visible, together with a tigress-like expression of ferocity which rarely appears on the face of a mother, or of any human being, where insanity does not exist. When she spoke, however, her words were collected, and her manner was impressive and even dignified; the look of maniac anger gradually wore away from her face, and in every sentence she uttered there were proofs that something of power had naturally existed in her fallen and clouded mind.

“Want of money was the earliest thing I remember to feel,” she said, as she seated herself, with something more of composure in her manner. “There was never any money in my father’s house. I wondered at first where it could all go; I watched and reflected, and used all means of finding out the mystery. At last I knew it—my father drank; in the privacy of his room, when no eye was on him, he drank, drank. He paid strict enough attention to my education. I read with him much; he had stores of books. I read the Bible with him, too; often he spent long evenings expounding it to me. But I saw the hollowness of it all—he hardly believed himself; he doubted—doubted all, while he would fain have made me a believer. I saw it well: I heard him rave of it in a fever into which drink had thrown him. All was dark to him, he said, when he was near dying; but he had taught his child to believe; he had done his best to make her believe. He did not know my heart; I was his own child; I longed for sensual things; my heart burned with a wish for money, but it all went for drink. Had I but been able then to procure food and clothes as others of my rank did, the burning wish for money that consumed my heart then and now might never have been kindled, and I might have been rich as those often become who have never wished for riches. Yes, the eagerness of my wishes has always driven money far away from me; that cursed gold and silver, it flows on them who have never worshiped it—never longed for it till their brain turned; and it will not come to such as me, whose whole life has been a desire for it. Well, my father died, and I was left without a penny; all the furniture went to pay the spirit-merchant. I went to Ireland; I lived with relations who were poor and ignorant: I heard the cry of want of money there too. A father and mother and seven children, and me, the penniless orphan: we all wanted money—all cried for it. At last my cry was answered in a black way; I saw the sight of money at last; a purse heaped, overflowing with money, was put into my hands. My brain got giddy at the sight; sin and virtue became all one to me at the sight. Gold, gold! my father would hardly ever give me one poor shilling; the people with whom I lived hardly ever had a shilling among them. I became the mistress of a rich man—a married man; his wife and children were living there before my eyes—a profligate man; his sins were the talk of the countryside. I hated him; he was old, deformed, revolting; but he chained me to him by money. Then I enjoyed money for a while; I kept that purse in my hand; I laid it down so as my eyes would rest on it perpetually. I dressed; I squandered sum after sum; the rich man who kept me had many other expenses: his money became scantier; we quarreled; another offered me more money—I went to him.”

A deep groan shook the whole frame of the unfortunate young poet at this statement—a groan which in its intensity might have separated soul and body.

“Let me go—let me go!” he cried, raising himself for a moment, and then sinking back again in his chair in a passive state.

His mother seemed a little softened by his agitation, though she made no comment on it, but continued her narrative as if no interruption had taken place.

“Money took me to a new master; he was richer than the first; he bound my heart to him by the profusion of his money. He was old and withered, but his gold and silver reflected so brightly on his face, I came to think him handsome; he was your father; you were born; after your birth I think I even loved him. I urged him to marry me; he listened; he even promised—yes, marriage and money—money—they were almost in my very grasp. I was sure—sure—when he went to England to arrange some business, he said; he wrote fondly for a while; I lived in an elysium; money and an honorable marriage were my own. I had not one doubt; but he ceased to write to me—all at once he ceased; had it been a gradual drawing off, my brain would not have reeled as it did. At last, when fear and anxiety had almost thrown me into a fever, a letter came. It announced in a few words that your father was married to a young, virtuous, and wealthy lady; he had settled a small annuity on me for life, and never wished to see or hear from me again. A violent illness seized me then; it was a kind of burning fever. All things around me seemed to dazzle, and assume the form of gold and silver; I struggled and writhed to grasp the illusion; they were forced to tie my hands—to bind me down in my bed. I recovered at last, but I had grown all at once old, withered, stricken in mind and body by that sickness. For a long time—for years—I lived as if in a lingering dream; I had no keen perceptions of life; my wishes had little energy; my thoughts were confused and wandering; even the love of money and the want of money failed to stir me into any kind of action. I have something of the same kind of feeling still,” she said, raising her hand to her head. “The burning fever into which I was thrown when your father’s love vanished from me, is often here even yet, though its duration is brief; but it is sufficient to make me incapable of any exertion by which I could make money. I have trusted to you; I have hoped that you might be the means of raising me from my poverty; I have long hoped to see the gold and silver of your earning. I did not say much at first, when I saw you turning a poet; I had heard that poetry was the sure high-road to poverty, but I said little then. I was hardly able to judge and know rightly what you should do when you commenced writing in your boyhood; but my head is a little cooler now; the scorching fire of the money your father tempted me with, and then withdrew, is quenched a little by years. Now at last I see that you are wasting your time and health with that pen; you have not made one shilling—one single sixpence for me, yet, with that pen of yours; your health is going fast; I see the color of the grave on your thin cheeks. Now I command you to throw away your pen, and make money for me at any trade, no matter how low or mean.”

As she spoke, there was a look approaching to dignity in her wasted face, and her tones were clear and commanding—the vulgar Irishism and Scoticism of dialect which, on common occasions, disfigured her conversation, had disappeared, and it was evident that her intellect had at one period been cultivated, and superior to the ordinary class of minds.

Andrew rose without saying one syllable in answer to his mother’s communication; he threw his manuscripts and the sheets which he had written into a desk; he locked it with a nervous, trembling hand, and then turned to leave the room. His face was of the most ghastly paleness; his eyes were calm and fixed; he seemed sick at heart by the disclosure he had heard; his lips trembled and shook with agitation.

“Where are you going, Andrew? It’s a bitter night.”

“Mother, it is good enough for me—for a—”

He could not speak the hated word which rose to his lips; he had an early horror of that word; he had dreaded that his was a dishonorable birth: even in his boyish days he had feared it; his mother had often asserted to the contrary, but now she had dispelled the belief in which he had rested.

He opened the door hastily, and passed out into the storm, which was rushing against the windows.

A feeling of pity for him—a feeling of a mother’s affection and solicitude, was stirred in Mrs. Carson’s soul, as she listened to his departing footsteps, and then went and seated herself beside the embers of a dying fire in the kitchen; it was a small, cold, miserably-furnished kitchen; the desolation of the severe season met no counterbalancing power there; no cheering appearances of food, or fire, or any comforts were there. But the complaining spirit which cried and sighed perpetually was for once silent within Mrs. Carson’s mind; something—perhaps the death-like aspect of her son, or a voice from her long stifled conscience—was telling her how ill she had fulfilled the duties of a mother. She felt remorse for the reproaches she had heaped on him before he had gone out in the storm.

She waited to hear his knock at the door; she longed for his returning steps; she felt that she would receive him with more of kindness than she had for a length of time displayed to him; she kept picturing to herself perpetually his thin face and emaciated figure, and a fear of his early death seized on her for the first time; she had been so engrossed by her own selfish wants, that she had scarcely remarked the failing health of her son. She started with horror at the probabilities which her naturally powerful fancy suggested. She resolved to call in medical aid immediately, for she was sure now that Andrew’s constitution was sinking fast. But how would she pay for medical aid? she had not one farthing to procure advice. At this thought the yearning, burning desire for money which had so long made a part of her existence came back with full force; she sat revolving scheme after scheme, plan after plan, of how she could procure it. Hours passed away, but still she sat alone, silently cowering over the cinders of the fire.

At length she started up, fully awake, to a sense of wonder and dread at Andrew’s long absence. She heard the sound of distant clocks striking twelve. It was unusual for Andrew to be out so late, for he had uniformly kept himself aloof from evil companions. The high poetical spirit within him, a spirit which utterly engrossed him, had kept him from the haunts of vice. His mother went to the door, and opening it, gazed on the narrow, mean street. The storm had passed away; the street was white with hail and snow; the moon shone clearly down between the tall but dilapidated houses of which the street or lane was composed; various riotous-looking people were passing by; and from a neighboring house the brisk strains of a violin came, together with the sound of voices and laughter. The house had a bad repute in the neighborhood, but Mrs. Carson never for an instant suspected her son was there. She looked anxiously along the street, and at every passing form she gazed earnestly, but none resembled her son.

For a long time she stood waiting and watching for the appearance of Andrew, but he did not come. At last, sinking with cold and weariness, and with a host of phantom fears rising up in her bewildered brain, and almost dragging her mind down into the gulf of utter madness, on the brink of which she had so long been, Mrs. Carson returned to the kitchen. As she looked on the last ember dying out on the hearth, a feeling of frenzy shook her frame. Andrew would soon return, shivering with cold, and she had no fire to warm him—no money to purchase fire. She thought of the wealthy—of their bright fires—and bitter envy and longing for riches gnawed her very heart and life. A broken deal chair was in a corner of the kitchen; she seized it, and after some efforts succeeded in wrenching off a piece, which she placed on the dying ember, and busied herself for some time in fanning; then she gathered every remaining fragment of coals from the recess at one side of the fire-place, in which they were usually kept, and with the pains and patience which poverty so sorely teaches, she employed herself in making some appearance of a fire. Had she been in her usual mood, she would have sat anathematizing her son for his absence at such an hour; but now every moment, as she sat awaiting his return, her heart became more kindly disposed toward him, and an uneasy feeling of remorse for her past life was each instant gaining strength amidst the variety of strange spectral thoughts and fancies which flitted through her diseased mind. At some moments she fancied she saw her father seated opposite to her on the hearth, and heard him reading from the Bible, as he did so often in her girlish days: then again he was away in the privacy of his own room, and she was watching him through a crevice of the door, and she saw him open the cabinet he kept there, and take out liquor, ardent spirits, and he drank long and deep draughts, until gradually he sank down on his bed in the silent, moveless state of intoxication which had so long imposed on her, for she had once believed that her father was subject to fits of a peculiar kind. She groaned and shuddered as this vision was impressed on her; she saw the spirit of evil which had destroyed her father attaching itself next to her own fate, and leading her into the depths of guilt, and she trembled for her son. Had he now fallen in sin? was some evil action detaining him to such an hour? He was naturally inclined to good, she knew—strangely good and pure had his life been, considering he was her child, and reared so carelessly as she had reared him; but now he had been urged to despair by her endless cry for money, and, perhaps, he was at that very instant engaged in some robbery, by which he would be able to bring money to his mother.

So completely enslaved had her mind become to a lust for money, that the thought of his gaining wealth by any means was for some time delightful to her; she looked on their great poverty, and she felt, in her darkened judgment, that they had something of a right to take forcibly a portion of the superabundant money of the rich. Her eyes glared with eagerness for the sight of her son returning with money, even though that money was stolen; the habitual mood of her mind prevailed rapidly over the impressions of returning goodness and affection which for a brief period had awoke within her.

In the midst of the return of her overwhelming desire for money, Andrew’s knock came to the door. The eager inquiry whether he had brought any money with him was bursting from her lips the moment she opened the door and beheld him, but she was cheeked by the sight of two strangers who accompanied him. Andrew bade the men follow him, and walked rapidly to the kitchen; the tones of his voice were so changed and hollow that his mother hardly recognized him to be her son.

He requested the men to be seated, telling them that when the noise on the street would be quiet and the people dispersed they would get that for which they had come. At that moment a drunken broil on the street had drawn some watchmen to the neighborhood.

He bade his mother follow him, and proceeded hastily to his own room. By the aid of a match he lighted the miserable candle by which, some hours previously, he had been writing.

“Mother, here is money—gold—here—your hand.” He pressed some gold coins into her hand. “Gold! ay, gold, gold, indeed!” gasped his mother, the intensity of her joy repressing for the instant all extravagant demonstrations of it.

“Go, go away to the kitchen; in about five or ten minutes let the men come here, and they will get what I have sold them.”

“Money! money at last; gold—gold!” cried his mother, altogether unconscious of what her son was saving, and only awake to the blessed sense of having at last obtained money.

“Away, I say; go to the kitchen. I have no time to lose.”

“Money! blessings, blessings on you and God—money!” She seemed still in ignorance of Andrew’s request that she would withdraw.

“Away, I say, I must be alone; away to the kitchen, and leave me alone; but let the men come here in a few minutes and take what they have purchased.”

He spoke with a strange energy. She obeyed him at last, and left the room: she remembered afterward that his face was like that of a dead man when he addressed her.

She returned to the kitchen. The two men were seated where she had left them, and were conversing together: their strong Irish accent told at once their country. Mrs. Carson paid no attention to them; she neither spoke to them nor looked at them; she held tightly clasped in her hand the few gold coins her son had given her; she walked about like one half distracted, addressing audible thanksgiving to God one instant, and the next felicitating herself in an insane manner on having at last obtained some money. The two men commented on her strange manners, and agreed that she was mad, stating their opinions aloud to each other, but she did not hear them.

The noise and quarreling on the street continued for some time, and the men manifested no impatience while it lasted. All became quiet after a time; the desertion and silence of night seemed at last to have settled down on the street. The two men then manifested a strong wish to finish the business on which they had come.

“I say, whereabouts is it—where’s the snatch, my good woman?” said one of the men, addressing Mrs. Carson.

She looked on him and his companion with amazement mingled with something of fear, for the aspects of both were expressive of low ruffianism.

“She’s mad, don’t you see,” said the one who had not addressed her.

The other cursed deeply, saying that as they had given part payment, they would get their errand, or their money back again.

At this, a gleam of recollection crossed Mrs. Carson’s mind, and she informed them that her son had mentioned about something they had purchased, which was in his room. She thought at the instant, that perhaps he had disposed of one of his manuscripts at last, though she wondered at the appearance of the purchasers of such an article.

“That’s it,” cried the men; “show us the way to the room fast; it’s all quiet now.”

Anxious to get rid of the men, Mrs. Carson proceeded hastily to her son’s room, followed closely by the men. The first object she saw, on opening the door, was Andrew, leaning on his desk; the little desk stood on the table, and Andrew’s head and breast were lying on it, as if he was asleep. There was something in his fixed attitude which struck an unpleasant feeling to his mother’s heart.

“Andrew!” she said; “Andrew, the men are here.”

All was silent. No murmur of sleep or life came from Andrew. His mother ran to his side, and grasped his arm: there was no sound, no motion. She raised his head with one hand, while at the same time she glanced at an open letter, on which a few lines were scrawled in a large, hurried hand. Every word and letter seemed to dilate before her eyes, as in a brief instant of time she read the following:

“Mother, I have taken poison. I have sold my body to a doctor for dissection; the money I gave you is part of the price. You have upbraided me for never making money: I have sold all I possess—my body—and given you money. You have told me of the stain on my birth; I can not live and write after that; all the poetical fame in this world would not wash away such a stain. Your bitter words, my bitter fate, I can bear no longer; I go to the other world; God will pardon me. Yes, yes, from the bright moon and stars this night, there came down a voice, saying, God would take me up to happiness amid his own bright worlds. Give my body to the men who are waiting for it, and so let every trace of Andrew Carson vanish from your earth.”

With a lightning rapidity Mrs. Carson scanned each word; and not until she had read it all, did a scream of prolonged and utter agony, such as is rarely heard even in this world of grief burst from her lips; and with a gesture of frenzied violence she flung the money she had kept closely grasped in her hand at the men. One of them stooped to gather it up, and the other ran toward Andrew, and raised his inanimate body a little from its recumbent position. He was quite dead, however; a bottle, marked “Prussic Acid,” was in his hand. The two men, having recovered the money, hurried away, telling Mrs. Carson they would send immediate medical aid, to see if any thing could be done for the unfortunate young man. Mrs. Carson did not hear them; a frenzied paroxysm seized her, and she lay on the floor screaming in the wild tones of madness, and utterly incapable of any exertion. She saw the money she had received with such rapture carried away from before her eyes, but she felt nothing: money had become terrible to her at last.

Her cries attracted a watchman from the street. A doctor was soon on the spot; but Andrew Carson was no more connected with flesh, and blood, and human life; he was away beyond recall, in the spirit-world.

An inquest was held on the body, and a verdict of temporary insanity returned, as is usual in such cases of suicide. The young poet was buried, and soon forgotten.

Mrs. Carson lingered for some weeks; her disease assumed something of the form of violent brain-fever; in her ravings she fancied perpetually that she was immersed in streams of fluid burning gold and silver. They were forcing her to drink draughts of that scorching gold, she would cry; all was burning gold and silver: all drink, all food, all air, and light, and space around her. At the very last she recovered her senses partially, and calling, with a feeble but calm voice, on her only beloved child, Andrew, she died.