who still lived), as she used to be, young and gay, innocent and happy; but where was she now? How his heart yearned towards her! He had never known before how dearly he had loved her. His thoughts were turned into a new channel; they were fixed upon his child. She had loved him once, and dearly. Her parents had loved her with all a parents' love; their affections had centred in her after they had lost all their other children. But they were poor; the old man had no longer the strength he formerly had; old age was stealing upon him, and his earnings were not so great as they had been. The good child saw this, and that her parents worked harder than they were able to support her. They had never proposed to her to leave them to gain her own livelihood; they even dreaded she should think of it; they loved to gaze upon her, to hear her merry laugh, and they received all her dutiful affection and kindness with hearts overflowing with gratitude to God, who had preserved her to them, to be their staff and comfort in the vale of years into which they were both hastening; but she would go, and they let her go at last. It was but reasonable, and better for her; they did. not require her assistance; their own wants were

few, and were easily satisfied. The light work that was necessary was not beyond her mother's strength, and was rather serviceable to one who had always been used to labour. The young girl was only idle, and, though she was docile and obedient, they knew too well into how many evils idleness often leads the young, long or seriously to oppose her wish. Not that she desired to leave her parents, but to earn for them, to provide them with many little comforts which their increasing age would soon render necessary. She would not go far from them; she would often, very often, see them, as often as she could. It never occurred to her that it was possible a time might come when she should wish to bend her steps in any other direction than that which led to the home of her dear, her devoted, and her bereaved parents. A place was found, one which held out a promise of being everything they could wish as a safe, a respectable, and a happy abode for their dear, their only child. We have shown, alas! (in a former Chapter) that it did not prove so. There are hearts so bad, natures so abandoned, as to covet most those forbidden pleasures which are difficult of attainment,—to break down, by degrees, and insensibly, as it were, the barriers

which a virtuous education has placed as an obstacle in their way, and, by slow, insidious, and deliberate means, to undermine the springs from which so many beautiful and engaging virtues flow. Oh! deadly perversion of the human mind, what poison can have been instilled into thy nature?-under what Satanic influence dost thou live, and move, and have thy being, that nothing but the ruin of the best, the most innocent, and, we may almost say, the most favoured of God's creation, should satisfy thy malignant spirit? Can virtue, unsuspecting and confiding, perceive the artful windings with which thou seekest to carry out thy wicked purposes? Under the guise of virtue alone canst thou make thy attacks upon the young, the open, the ingenuous heart. How insensibly dost thou distil thy honied words into her unsuspecting mind, till, before she knows it herself, her heart is enslaved! It is no longer her own; perverted reason flatters itself that the appearance of so much good must be real, and exalts the disinterestedness, which, forgetting inequality of rank and station, would brave the censures of the world for her sake. Alas! she is caught in the snare; too late she finds her mistake. Such was the fate of our poor girl. We have already told

her tale; we have traced her in her wanderings, and accompanied her in her sorrows; we have seen her at last conveyed to an Asylum, offering her peace, and an opportunity for repentance. (Poor girl! she repented long ago, but she requires rest for her shattered soul, a balm to her broken spirit.) We left her for awhile to visit the abode of her dying parent and bereaved father.

It has been justly said that "the heart knoweth its own bitterness ;" and the old man felt this in all its force, when, restless, uneasy, and alone, the very place in which he had spent so many happy years, surrounded by his family, became distasteful to him, till at last he resolved to change his abode, and he had done so only a short time before his daughter, awakened to a deep sense of her position by her accidental visit to the chapel, had been seeking him. A morbid desire of indulging his grief, unobserved and unobtruded upon, had induced him to evade all questions as to whither he was going; and thus it was the poor girl had been unable to learn any tidings of him. Something, however, had been forgotten-some reminiscence of former times-and he came back to seek it, and then he learned his daughter had been seen in the chapel, that she had been recognised by

some of her former friends, but had appeared to wish to avoid them, and made her way straight to her father's former house,-that, not finding him, she had disappeared again, refusing to be comforted. At this the old man gave way to a burst of grief, and reproached himself bitterly for the rash step he had taken, by which he had lost his child a second time; then he hastened to the chapel, to one who had been the adviser of her youth, and his comforter in his sorrows; and he poured out his tale to a not unpitying ear, to one who, indeed, consoled him.

eyes

On the evening of that day might be seen seated, in the reception-room of the Convent, the attenuated form of a venerable-looking old man ; his care-worn cheek, and his red with weeping, showed him to have been a great sufferer. He was bent gently forward, as if from weakness, or under the pressure of some mental sorrow; but it was not so now, for he was happy. A little behind him stood a girl in the dress of the penitents; her hand was upon his shoulder, and her tears fell fast over the bowed-down head of her parent. Yes, it was her parent; the father had found his long-lost child, she over whom he had mourned, more than over those who were