JESSIE'S ACQUAINTANCE MADE. 61

angels’ thoughts on the grassy fields; and what did
she meet? Women that the rich and pampered
daughters of untempted virtue loathed ; but she met
not with her daughter. She went out on cold, deso-
late, pinching nights of winter, when happy fami-
lies sat round happy hearths—fathers, and mothers,
and little children, and blessed God that they lived
in a Christian land, where all misery was cared for ;
and what did she still meet? Poor, unfortunate
women again—creatures that God had made a little
lower than the angels; for what? To be the prey
of the vilest passions of man; to be despised,
scorned, pointed at, trampled on; to be miserable
and outcast! These she saw, winter and summer,
alike ; these, beauty and misery, going hand-in-hand
down to the pit! Yes, young man,” said she, lifting
up an admonitory finger, “such as you it is that do
this work of death and the devil! and think not
that you shall come here, paying your flattering,
false attentions to that old woman’s grand-daughter
unwatched and unprevented !”

“Upon my soul,” said the young man, quite
taken by surprise, “I am sincere as the very sun
in heaven! Only, you see, as yet, I am in tram-
mels; I am not my own master.” ,

* Enough ! enough!” said the old woman. “ But
I have not yet done. You asked for Jessie's history,
and we are not yet come to it. I had been out
one night to get a bit of butcher’s-meat ; I had not
had a bit for months, and somehow or other the
fancy took me to have a bit; so I went out that
Saturday night, and had not gone far, before I was
stopped by a crowd at the door of a house,.where
they said that a man was ill-using a woman. ‘It’s

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