"She knew his snare, and has been warned of the consequences, but she drank as shamefully as he did, and never had a fireside fit for him to sit down by. She left him to his own devices, well aware of narrow escapes before from the death he has met now; and, while neglecting all her duty to him, and home, and children, who is to acquit her of being the indirect cause of the accident?"

But, you see, all this might have happened to the drunken husband of a sober wife, and we are not legally able to recognise her in the matter."

"Very true; but, strictly speaking, such deaths are not accidental; they are something between murder and suicide. If he had been sober, he would not have been on the rails, and if he had possessed a good wife, and a peaceful home, he might have been sober. It is well to aim at the beer-shops, but they are not the only sources of the mischief."

The event, which had furnished sad subject of thought to the wise and good, and food for exciting gossip among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, was of immense use to the widow herself. Lost as she was, by her own deliberate conduct, to all sense of womanly feeling and delicacy of mind, her husband's awful death was to her the seed of a great harvest. She was "the poor widow, whose drunken husband was killed on the railway." She was "left with a family wholly unprovided for, and had only her own exertions to look to for their support."

"Poor thing! as if it were not enough to have led her a life of misery, but he must shock her nearly to death by such an end!" commented one kind-hearted lady, as she tied up a bundle of clothing and sent it, with a present of money besides, to the widow's house; while others, equally pitiful and

generous, gave as their means allowed to this "case of destitution," without coming to see and inquire into it for themselves. It is singular that it seldom enters these gentle hearts to think that the sin and provocation in such "a case" may not have been all on one side.

So Mrs. Swinden towered above all her neighbours on the stilts of her misfortune and bereavement, put on her gifts of faded mourning, and sometimes with one child, sometimes two or three, presented herself at the houses of the gentry, and told her grievous story in her own lying fashion to servants, and mistresses and masters, wherever she could get a hearing, and often young ladies would come down and give from their little store, and servants would find an old garment in their box, and gather round to see the poor woman whose "case" was in all the newspapers.

'Lightly come, lightly go" is a true proverb. Money's worth is only known to those who work for it, and though there is fear of the snare on the other side, yet under any circumstances those who work and save are infinitely more respectable than those who beg and spend. "If any man will not work, neither shall he eat," is a rule of the Holy Book, dictated by Him who knows what is in us.

Mrs. Swinden did no work, and she ate, or rather drank, as long as her gifts lasted. Then the bundles of clothing melted rapidly away, and articles that the givers only spared because they thought it a duty to help to clothe the naked and consider the poor, were soon piled on the shelves of the pawnshop, and the half-drunken mother would stagger home to throw her children a few pence to get bread for their craving hunger, while she lay down to sleep of the effects or her own indulgence.

The poor child whose brain had given way under the shock caused by the sudden view on its father's mutilated remains,

had never been healthy, and for reasons best known to herself Mrs. Swinden had made it a member of a burial society, and managed to maintain the usual deposit.

Her thoughts took a dreadful turn as she looked on the little pining creature, and felt the maddening power of the drunkard's thirst. And then the child pined more and shrank more; the coarse food she offered it would not digest, however greedily devoured at first, and there were easy ways of accounting for its illness. So its strength all went, and a little shadow of skin and bone quietly yielded up the breath of life, that a mother's loving care might have cherished into health and bloom, and made a strength and staff to her own old age.

She had watched, not to detain the lingering spark of its earthly existence, as watching mothers yearn to do as long as God permits, but in anxious hope of its quicker departure; and when at last the flicker ceased, and the chill of death had settled on the skeleton frame, she laid it out, and set up a great lamentation at the new "stroke" that had fallen upon her.

An unsuspecting doctor gave the necessary certificate, and the burial society paid the money demanded by a member's death; and again Mrs. Swinden was her own heroine.

The club money and the proceeds of begging expeditions were soon exhausted in such hands as Mrs. Swinden's, and again she cast about for means of replenishing her purse. What could she do? Work? Not if she could help it, certainly. Beg? The givers were tired just now, having been well taxed by the two deaths on which she had traded so successfully. Sell something? She looked round; there was nothing left to sell; the room contained little now but the children, and if any one would buy children she would certainly have sold them. Steal? Ah, but how? From whom? Why, had she

not a victim? Was there not somebody who dared not resist a demand if she chose to make it? The bright thought was worthy of her cause, and forthwith she set about it. "Money I want, and money I must have," she said to herself. "They will trust me no longer, and I can't live without drink." So she put her widow's bonnet over her straggling hair and unwashed face (she had preserved the bonnet because of the woeful tale it silently told), and drawing the old shawl, on which no pawnbroker would advance a penny, round her shoulders, she went out to pay a visit.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE BOTTOM OF THE INCLINE.

ENJAMIN FIELD had to answer Mr. Hill's letter, and recent circumstances made him more than ever anxious for his return; but no word or message was to be got from Mrs. Hill, and he was quite undecided how far it would be right to convey his own fears and opinions to the absent husband.

"It may not be so bad as we fear, you know, dear husband," said Ellen, "and if there is real cause for our idea about it, it will be time enough for him to know, when he is here to find a remedy."

Benjamin shook his head. If there were a ray of light, his own gentle wife would be sure to see it; but he was not sanguine.

"I feel a kind of presentiment about her," said he, "she seems so changed. And when once a woman takes to

Well, well, I'll try not to think of it, and write as earnestly as I dare. It's bad enough in a man, and my own experience prevents me from despairing of one—but in a woman. Oh, Ellen! it does seem as if she could never be reclaimed."

Ellen softly repeated the sweet words which had often encouraged her in days and nights of trial about this very sin, and did not limit them to sex or circumstance: "With God all things are possible," "Able to save to the uttermost," "Is anything too hard for the Lord ?"

So Mr. Field wrote a few kind lines, saying that things were not looking bright or happy at home; that Mrs. Hill was evidently out of health, but refused her confidence to real friends; that the baby was far from well, and the other children often cried for him to come home; that work was waiting for him, and that all might yet be well if he would return to home and duty.

Though Mrs. Field felt that she was not a welcome visitor, she called as often as she could spare time to inquire after Mrs. Hill and her children; and she could not but observe the discomfort that now seemed common in that once neat and orderly dwelling, nor fail to note the changed manner of the once kind though hasty mother.

The children seemed always in disgrace about something, were often put to bed long before their usual hour, and were frightened at the sound of their mother's voice; while any allusion to their father was followed by a slap or a push, or the denial of something they wished for.

Mrs. Field felt all this keenly, and took refuge over the cradle, where she ventured now and then to make a remark on the baby.

"Wouldn't you just call with this little one at the doctor's, Mrs. Hill?" she asked, persuasively; "she seems to me not to be getting on at all.'

H