Lucy received her alms without reply; and with a faint heart and heavy step, passed into the public street:

"Has vice, then, the advantage over virtue ?" thought she. "No: it cannot be. Had I been inclined to vice, here would have been a shelter and a home. But it is all for the best."

Faintness and sickness of heart soon overcame her, and she sat down by the road-side. The exertions of the few past days had been prodigious, and she had been kept up only by the hope that, in a strange place and new situation, she might recover a measure of respectability by being useful, and then be able to bring up her son to labour. The disappointment had been excessive; and the stimulous to exertion no longer existing, she laid herself down by the road-side, as she supposed, to die.

Her little boy, though very young, had not been an unobservant spectator of these events; and, though he pondered them silently in his heart, from submission to his mother, yet he had drawn from them many an instructive lesson into his young heart. His mother, with difficulty, called him to her side.

"I am dying," said she: "the fatigue, the

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anxiety, the agony of the last few weeks, has been too much for my frame, and I must leave you, Robert. There is a weight upon my chest, as if a heavy hand was pressing on my heart, which shows that life is over with me; and I, the admired, the joyous, the beautiful Lucy Woods, must die a beggar's death in the ditch of the wayside. But my mind wanders. Robert, God is good, and your mother sinful. I suffer nothing but what I deserve. Remember, in after-life, the first lapse from virtue and honour is every thing. Beware of the first sin!"

A faintness came over her, and she sank down on the green bank. The child looked on in wonder and in sorrow. He knew what death was, but he hardly knew what would be the consequences to himself. He supported his mother's head; placed her on the green-sward, as conveniently as his strength would allow, and ran to seek for help. He soon found it. Several labourers, seeking their early toil, gathered around her, and bore her, though insensible, to a neighbouring farm house. A physician was sent for. The minister of the society was informed that a dying woman was at the dwelling of one of his parishioners; and, with characteristic Yankee cau

tion, one of the selectmen was notified that a stranger, most probably a travelling pauper, was breathing her last, and might bring down expense upon the town.

Lucy awoke to some degree of consciousness, but the physician asserted, there had been some inward rupture, and that she could not live, as she was bleeding internally. The minister and the selectman arrived at the same moment, time enough to hear the almost inaudible prayer of the dying Magdalen, expressing her confidence in the righteousness of Christ, begging that her enemies might be forgiven, and requesting that the blessing of Heaven might rest on her unprotected child.

As she breathed her last, the minister and the selectman at once recognized their late visiter. How did they feel? were there no goadings of conscience, as they remembered that her death might be laid to their door? or did they, as they shook hands in the apartment of death, congratulate each other, that they had done their duty to put down public mendicity? God knows.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE WANDERER AT HOME.

MEANTIME, a far different scene was enacting in that room of death, than the minister or the selectman, or the gazing labourers, were aware of.

A bright and beautiful company of angelic beings were hovering around the low couch, waiting for the separation of the living principle from its clayey tenement. It burst forth, unconscious at first, benumbed by its corporeal associations, but as reason and spiritual perception dawned, it looked around in wonder. The mild air of an early summer morning was breathing its balm over the emaciated body, late its resting place. The rising sunbeams were gilding the cold, pale forehead, and gleaming over the yellow hair; but the mild summer air, and the gleaming sunbeams, were to her but as nothing. The gales of heaven were breathing peace around her soul, and the sunlight of divine approbation was gilding every feeling of her heart.

She found herself, gently, insensibly, irrisistibly, wafted upward on the wings of angels, their radiant countenances smiling on her soul with a quiet as pure, as calm, as holy, as evening in Paradise.

"Oh! no, no!" was the uttered feeling: "I am not worthy of this! the harlot! the outcast! the impure! no: no."

There was no direct reply, but a song of choral harmony burst forth, and still the burden fell upon the ear: “Wash'd, wash'd in the blood of the Lamb! clad in the righteousness of Christ! redeemed! saved!" while other groups of attendant spirits caught up the strain, and on the long track of light that marked the path to the distant star of rest, the joyful pæan sounded, uttered in the melody of Heaven. Was there no look back

to earth? no remembrance of the young, the innocent, left a prey to men and dernons in this lower world? Some pang there might have been, but the first consciousness of awakened existence was too passive, almost too infantile, to admit of much remembrance, certainly of no anxiety; and the whispered words of one of the angelic attendants,

"He is in God's hands, who will