"At length, having missed her for several Sundays, I was called upon by a hard, coarse-featured woman, whom I knew as the keeper of a lodging-house, in a blind alley not far from my church, to visit a dying person who lodged under her roof. She called this sick person by no better term than a poor wretch; adding, however, that she was a harmless body, and very anxious for me to come and pray with her. Of course I resolved to obey the call, and having fixed the hour in the afternoon, she engaged to send a child to conduct me to the place. Accordingly an illlooking little fellow, the son of the lodging-house keeper, arrived about dusk that same evening, and walked before me, to the alley through sundry obscure and sordid ways, such as I should have found difficulty in tracing by myself, till he brought me to the front of a very large old house, which seemed almost ready to totter forward into the court.

It was in the month of November, and as he brought me into a common passage which ran through the whole of the house, the wind which whistled through it, caused me to draw my cloak still closer about me. Having procured a lighted candle through some door in this passage, he led me on, being obliged to shade the flame with his cap, till coming to a winding stair we began to ascend. I counted as many as four landings or flats, which were all thickly peopled, if one might judge from the various voices which proceeded from the doors opening on the lobbies, before we reached the foot of the highest stair, at which place the steps became narrower and more steep, being very little better than a ladder. I found that at the top of this stair there was another settlement, probably of persons still more degraded in the scale of society, or more reduced by poverty, than those below; for who that could help it, would take up his abode in a place so utterly comfortless as were these apartments immediately under the bare roof of this miserable abode? A tall man could scarcely have walked upright under the centre passage, whilst chill gusts of smoky air assailed one on every side, and reminded me that we were above the level of most of the neighbouring houses, and among the region of their chimneys.

"The boy stopped at length before a door at the most remote end of the passage, and waiting only to open it, he said rudely, there's the room; and that 'ere's the woman;' and as he spoke.

he walked off, leaving me to find my way down stairs as best I might. For an instant I could scarcely discern what was before me, but the next I seemed to have taken in the whole scene of that last refuge of poverty and destitution in all its particulars. The chamber, small as it was, was contracted above by the form of the roof, and a vast unplaned beam which ran across it; whilst right before me, projecting from the shelving roof was a small window, its form made more distinctly visible from the reflection of a lamp at the entrance of the court. The walls were embrowned, not to say blackened, by the sooty atmosphere in which the garret was situated, though there was no grate to the room itself. A dilapidated table, a single chair, a pallet bed, with a few half-broken pans and cups, were all the furniture which this wretched abode contained.

“The table stood by the side of the pallet, and seated upright on that pallet, with her feet covered by the bed clothes, was the poor creature I had come to see. She had been represented to me as in a dying state, and truly she had the aspect of one who had not long to live; but she was working with her needle by the glimmer of a small candle, and so engaged was she with her sewing that she did not look up when I entered, giving me time to observe how her hands trembled, and how incapable she seemed of guiding her needle. I thought it right to make her immediately aware of my presence, but I had hardly uttered the first word, when she looked up and shewed the face of the poor emaciated creature whom I had missed from her wonted place during the few last Sundays.

"She dropped her needle-work when she saw me, exclaiming in a voice which seemed to come deep from the chest, Oh! kind and good Sir, and have you taken the trouble to come to me? How I have wished to see you, and to tell you how happy, through the divine favor, how very, very happy you have been permitted to make me.' She then invited me to sit down, pointing to her only chair.

"Happy? I thought; and 'happy,' I said, while I glanced, blind as I was, on all the tokens of wretchedness about me, marvelling that such a word should proceed from any one so utterly bereft as this poor creature seemed to be, of every kind of

comfort.

"I was just trying sir,' said the poor creature, 'to finish this shirt-I could do one a day before this sickness, and get as much as sixpence between morning and night at most times; but I shall never do as much again. But that', she added, coloring, and with a deep-fetched breath, 'was not what I sent to speak to you about, kind sir; these are not things which trouble me, my heavenly Father will make my means and my necessities to square, and I can have no fear. I did not wish if I could have helped it to be removed to the poor house before I saw you; and so I thought if I could but finish this last shirt, I might manage to be kept here a few days longer; so I was doing my best when you came up, and beg your pardon for not seeing you at first.' Then pressing her wasted hand upon her forehead, she continued, after a short pause, as if to take breath. But my head wanders! This is not what I had to say.'

666

"Well, well,' I answered; be still a few minutes - lean back on your bolster, and try to recollect yourself. I hope that you desired to speak to me about Christ the sinner's hope. I will say some of his encouraging words to you.' I then repeated a few of the sweet promises contained in scripture, slowly and gently, hoping that she would recollect herself, and be able presently to tell me what was on her mind; but I hoped in vain. I soon, however, apprehended the truth, that she was actually in immediate want of nourishment, though she did not say so.

I discovered too that there was an old woman who lived on the same floor who had shewn her many kindnesses, and having found this woman, I engaged her to provide some warm tea, and other nourishment; and promising to return the next morning, I departed.

"I did as I promised; and when I came again, I found the poor creature much better. Her neighbour had done what I requested, and done it kindly; and she was then able to tell me what so filled me with joy and thankfulness to my heavenly Father, that the impressions which she produced upon me by her communications remain to this day as strongly as they did at the first

moment.

"I will endeavor to give you an account of her experience, as nearly as possible, in her own language. She was, as I gathered from different passages of her discourse, the daughter of a

cottager in one of the western counties, and was bereaved of her parents, by their deaths from fever, when in her eighth year, at the same time, and by the same means losing an only brother, of whom she still retained a fond remembrance. When left an orphan, she had been put out as an apprentice in a farm-house, and had, when she had served out her time, been tempted by an acquaintance, a girl of her own age, to come up to London, and try her fortune in service. There she experienced many troubles in the drudgery of lodging-houses and such like situations, and at length exchanged one sort of hardship for another, by marrying a waterman, who left her, as she thought, only for a voyage of a few days, but never returned, though, as she added, she had expected him not only for months but years, supposing him to have been pressed, and never leaving the neighbourhood in which they had lived together, lest he might return and miss her. He had left her with two children; she had endeavored to support them by her needle, but they had both died some` months after their father's disappearance, evidently fromhard and scanty fare; since that period she had kept herself from absolute want by her needle, in making shirts for shops where ready-made linen is sold; but never, at her best, being able to earn more than would suffice to enable her to exist from day to day.

"Such is the outline of her history; and it is one, I fear, by no means remarkable. Multitudes of slaving sempstresses in London, and other great towns, have it in their power to tell more disastrous tales; but few there are, I imagine, who when after having received the inestimable benefit of a new and divine nature, possess that clearness of head and correctness of diction by which the poor woman in question, Elizabeth Lornly, was enabled to understand and describe something of the change which had passed upon her, and the state of her mind before that change.

"She told me that the years which ensued immediately after the death of her children, were spent as a mere animal; the daily pressure of her necessities never suffering her to cease for an hour from one and the same manual occupation. The most drudging servant,' she said, 'finds some variety in her toils, but the poor sempstress, one who works for hire, and, as I did,

always at the same description of garment, knows no variety; and if she sit alone, as it was my fate to do, finding little comfort in the company of other poor creatures like myself, her very power of thinking seems at length to die within her. I can say of those years of my lonely widowhood, after I had given up all hope of seeing my husband again, that they passed like a long hopeless dream. I felt myself bound down as by many chains, but I could not change my condition, or think of getting into service again for want of decent apparel, as well as from the incapacity which grew upon me from constant sitting, of undertaking any active service. I settled it in my mind, therefore, that I must go on in the condition in which I then was until I got absolutely helpless; and then, thought I, if I may not die on my own bed, I must be content to die in a poor-house,—but I shrunk from this idea.

“As to a future life, I had never any thoughts of it; though I had many of the death of the body, and how it was to be with that body when it had become inanimate. I thought what sort of funeral was bestowed on the pauper, and whether my remains would be left undisturbed till the dust had gone to dust again.

"Exactly opposite my window,' she continued, rising above the roofs of the neighbouring houses is the tower of the church, where first it pleased God that I should hear you, sir; and as you might see, if you would look out, there is a grated window in the belfry on this side, which answers to one on the other, shewing the bells themselves quite clearly in some lights. Many a time when I have sat stitching at that window I have seen the great bell move, when they have been tolling it for a funeral, the motion being followed by the deep dead sound of the stroke of the muffled tongue, which never failed to speak to my heart, as if calling on me to remember that I too must die. But those people are much mistaken who suppose, that thoughts of death are necessarily thoughts of God, or tending in any way to raise the mind to profitable enquiry; for if I then thought of my Maker at all, I thought only of Him, as of one who had dealt hardly by me; and I had no more understanding of his goodness in chaining me down in my unconverted state from wantoning as I might have done in the pleasures of sin, by the hard neces