telling him that, small as the sum is, considering your wants, you accept it." What a poor thing you must have thought me, when you got my cold letter of acceptance. Do me the justice to believe me when I affirm that every word of it was dictated by my husband. How I have longed to see you in person, to tell you all that I have endured and felt! But this circumstances have prevented. And now I am possessed with the idea that I never shall see you in this life again. And that is why I make these confessions. Your marriage, your absence in Europe, your recent return, and your hurried departure for the West, have kept me uncertain as to where a message would reach you. Yesterday I got a few affectionate lines from you, telling me a letter, if mailed at once, would reach you in Cincinnati, or, if a week later, in New Orleans. And so I am devoting the forenoon to this review of my past, so painful and sad.

a

Let me think of your happier lot, and rejoice in it. So your affairs have prospered beyond all hope! Through your wife. you are unexpectedly rich in worldly means. Better still, you are rich in affection. Your little Clara is "the brightest, the loveliest, the sunniest little thing in the wide world." So you write me; and I can well believe it from the photograph and the lock of hair you send me. Bless her! What would I give to hug her to my bosom. And you too, Henry, you too I could kiss with a kiss that should be purely maternal, benediction, a kiss your wife would approve, for, after all, you are the only child I have had. Mr. Charlton has always said he would have no children till he was a rich man. He and the female physician he employs have nearly killed me with their terrible drugs. Yes, I am dying, Henry. Even the breath of this sweet spring morning whispers it in my ear. Bless you and yours forever! What a mistake my life has been! And yet, how I craved to love and be loved! You will think kindly of me always, and teach your wife and child to have pleasant associations with my name.

All the rich presents your father made me have been sold by Mr. Charlton; but I have one, that he has not seen, a costly and beautiful gold casket for jewels, which I reserve as a present for your little Clara. I shall to-morrow pack it up care

fully, and take it to a friend, who I know will keep and deliver it safely. That friend, strange as it may sound to you, is the venerable old black hair-dresser, Toussaint, who lives in Franklin Street. Your father used to say he had never met a man he would trust before Toussaint; and I can say as much. Toussaint used to dress my mother's hair; he is now my adviser and friend.

Born a slave in the town of St. Mark in St. Domingo in 1766, Pierre Toussaint was twelve years the junior of that fellow-slave, the celebrated Toussaint l'Ouverture, born on the same river, who converted a mob of undrilled, uneducated Africans into an army with which he successively overthrew the forces of France, England, and Spain. At the beginning of the troubles in the island, in 1801, Pierre was taken by his master, the wealthy Mons. Berard, to New York. Berard, having lost his immense property in St. Domingo, soon died, and Pierre, having learnt the business of a hair-dresser, supported Madame Berard by his labors some eight years till her death, though she had no legal claim upon his service. Bred up, as he was, indulgently, Pierre's is one of those exceptional cases in which slavery has not destroyed the moral sense.

I know of few more truly venerable characters. A pious Catholic, he is one of the stanchest of friends. One of his rules through life has been, never to incur a debt, to pay on the spot for everything he buys. And yet he is continually giving away large sums in charity. One day I said, "Toussaint, you are rich enough; you have more than you want; why not stop working now?" He answered, "Madame, I have enough for myself, but if I stop work, I have not enough for others!" By the great fire of 1835, Toussaint lost by his investments in insurance companies. The Schuylers and the Livingstons passed around a subscription-paper to repair hist losses; but he stopped it, saying he would not take a cent from them, since there were so many who needed help more than he.

An old French gentleman, a white man, once rich, whom Toussaint had known, was reduced to poverty and fell sick. For several months Toussaint and his wife, Juliette, sent him a nicely cooked dinner; but Toussaint would not let him know from whom it came, "because," said the negro, "it might hurt his pride to know it came from a black man. Juliette once

called on this invalid to learn if her husband could be of any help. "O no," said the old Monsieur, "I am well known; I have good friends; every day they send me a dinner, served up in French style. To-day I had a charming vol-au-vent, an omelette, and green peas, not to speak of salmon. I am a person of some importance, you see, even in this strange land." And Juliette would go home, and she and Toussaint would have a good laugh over the old man's vauntings.*

But what has possessed me to enter into all these details! I know not, unless it is the desire to escape from less agreeable thoughts.

I have a request to make, Henry. You will think me fanciful, foolish, perhaps fanatical; and yet I am impelled, by an unaccountable impression, to ask you to give up the tickets you tell me you have engaged in the Pontiac, and to take passage for New Orleans in some other boat. If you ask me why, the only explanation I can give is, that the thought besets me, but the reason of it I do not know. Do you remember I once capriciously refused to let your father go in the cars to Springfield, although his baggage was on board? Those cars went through the draw-bridge, and many lives were lost. Write me that you will heed my request.

And now, Henry, son, nephew, friend, good by! Tell little Clara she has an aunt or grandmother (which, shall it be?) in New York who loves to think of her and to picture the fair forehead over which the little curl you sent me once fell. By the way, I have examined her photograph with a microscope, and have conceived a fancy that her eyes are of a slightly different color; one perhaps a gray and the other a mixed blue. Am I right? Tell your wife how I grieve to think that circumstances have not allowed us to meet and become personally acquainted. You now know all the influences that have kept us apart, and that have made me seem frigid and ungrateful, even when my heart was overflowing with affection. What more shall I say, except to sum up all my love for you and all my gratitude in the one parting prayer, Heaven bless you and yours! EMILY CHARLTON. ·

Your mother,

Having slept under Toussaint's roof, and seen him often, the writer can testify to the accuracy of this sketch of one of the most thorough gentlemen in bearing and in heart that he ever knew.

CHAPTER III.

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB.

"Bitten by rage canine of dying rich;

Guilt's blunder! and the loudest laugh of hell !"

Young.

HE poor little lady! First sold by a needy parent to an

old man, and then betrayed by her own uncalculating affections to a young one, whose nature had the torpor without the venerableness of age! Her heart, full of all loving possibilities, had steered by false lights and been wrecked. Brief had been its poor, shattered dream of household joys and domestic amenities!

It was the old, old story of the cheat and the dupe; of credulous innocence overmatched by heartless selfishness and fraud.

The young man "of genteel appearance and address" who last week, as the newspapers tell us, got a supply of dry-goods from Messrs. Raby & Co., under false pretences, has been arrested, and will be duly punished.

But the scoundrel who tricks a confiding woman out of her freedom and her happiness under the false pretences of a disinterested affection and the desire of a loving home, the swindler who, with the motives of a devil of low degree, affects the fervor and the dispositions of a loyal heart, for such an impostor the law has no lash, no prison. To play the blackleg and the sharper in a matter of the affections is not penal. Success consecrates the crime; and the victim, when her eyes are at length opened to the extent of the deception and the misery, must continue to submit to a yoke at once hateful and demoralizing; she must submit, unless she is willing to brave the ban of society and the persecutions of the law.

Ralph Charlton, when he gave his wife Berwick's letter the night before, had supposed she would sit down to pen an answer as soon as she was alone. And so the next morning, after visiting his office in Fulton Street, he retraced his steps, and re

entered his house soon after Toussaint had left, and just as Mrs. Charlton had put her signature to the last page of the manuscript, and, bowing her forehead on her palms, was giving vent to sobs of bitter emotion.

Charlton was that prodigy in nature, a young man in whom an avarice that would have been remarkable in a senile miser had put in subjection all the other passions. Well formed and not ungraceful, his countenance was at first rather prepossessing and propitiatory. It needed a keener eye than that of the ordinary physiognomist to penetrate to the inner nature. It was only when certain expressions flitted over the features that they betrayed him. You must study that countenance and take it at unawares before you could divine what it meant. Age had not yet hardened it in the mould of the predominant bias of the character. Well born and bred, he ought to have been a gentleman, but it is difficult for a man to be that and a miser at the same time. There was little in his style of dress that distinguished him from the mob of young business-men, except that a critical eye would detect that his clothes were well preserved. Few of his old coats were made to do service on the backs of the poor.

Charlton called himself a lawyer, his specialty being conveyancing and real estate transactions. His one purpose in life was to be a rich man. To this end all others must be subordinate. When a boy he had been taught to play on the flute; and his musical taste, if cultivated, might have been a saving element of grace. But finding that in a single year he had spent ten dollars in concert tickets, he indignantly repudiated music, and shut his ears even to the hand-organs in the street. He had inherited a fondness for fine horses. Before he was twenty-five he would not have driven out after Ethan Allen himself, if there had been any toll-gate keepers to pay. His taste in articles of food was nice and discriminating; but he now bought fish and beef of the cheapest, and patronized a milkman whose cows were fed on the refuse of the distilleries.

Charlton was not venturous in speculation. The boldest operation he ever attempted was that of his marriage. Before taking that step he had satisfied himself in regard to the state of the late Mr. Berwick's affairs. They could be disentangled,