concluded to let the matter drop, hoping that Charlie would hear nothing about the party. And so Marion Wilmer had triumphed. With her woman's arts and fears she had come between her husband and the best friend he had on earth. How many a wife has done such a thing?

Frederic Wilmer and Charles Stevens did not meet for several days after this; and when the former called to invite his friend to dine with him, he felt at once that he was no longer the Charles Stevens of the old time. He talked and joked after the old fashion, and said the old words, but his manner, and even his very smile, had lost their old heartiness; and Frederic felt it all.

Men have not the tact of women, in making graceful apologies, or getting out of an awkward dilemma. The young merchant had it several times at "his tongue's end" to allude to the party, and apologize in some way for the inadvertency on his part. But he could not implicate Marion, and he was too conscientious to tell a falsehood. So they parted, and Charles Stevens did not come to dinner, because an imperative engagement prevented; and after this Marion had Frederic all the evening to herself.

"I'm very sorry you can't go, Marion; but I'll run down and tell them not to wait for me, as I shan't leave you alone."

"Yes, you will, Fred," answered Marion, lifting her head from the pillow, and faintly smiling. "I shall sleep until your return; so your being here will do me no good. Kiss me now, and run off."

Mr. and Mrs. Wilmer had ridden down with a large party to the shore that day; but she had been taken ill with a severe headache, to which she was subject, and obliged to keep her chamber in the hotel, while the rest of the party were preparing to go off on a sailing excursion.

"Well, then, if you insist upon my going, good-by," and Wilmer laid back the uplifted hand very tenderly on the pillow, and left his wife to that best physician of head and heart aches-sleep.

he found a large addition had just been made to the party, and among them was his old friend, Charles Stevens. They met cordially, of course, with mutual expressions of surprise and pleasure, which were interrupted by the hurried preparations to embark.

The sailing-boat was not large, and, when all the ladies were seated, the boatmen thought it unsafe to put off with so large a company. On this account, a number of the gentlemen volunteered to take a small boat that lay on the shore near them, and among these were Charles Stevens and Frederic Wilmer.

It was a beautiful day when the two boats swept from the shore, the one riding the waves with her white sails leaping to the wind, and her green sides breasting the blue waters, as if she knew and rejoiced in the proud manhood and womanly loveliness which she carried.

The small boat was quite filled by the six gentlemen on board of her, who, waying their hats to the ladies, plied their oars right bravely, as they followed in the wake of the larger boat.

Again the heavens grew black with great masses of cloud. The wind freshened. The two boats had separated long before this; but now both were turned homeward. Fiercer and fiercer stormed the wind, madly hurling up the waves; · and the boats, now far apart, rocked and quivered as they plowed through the white foam.

Frederic Wilmer and Charles Stevens were the only two on board the smaller boat who understood perfectly how to manage her, and she was by no means well constructed to ride against the wind. Two of the gentlemen, thoughtlessy standing up in it, grew dizzy, lost their equilibrium, and, in attempting to regain it, fell to one side, nearly capsizing the boat. In Fred's alarm, the oar fell from his hand into the sea. He leaned over, making a quick, blind motion to secure it; the boat dipped again, and when she righted a second time, Frederic Wilmer was in the sea.

He was not an expert swimmer, and, after battling for a moment with those wild waves, he went down, and there was none to save him.

distance; it would have been certain death to have committed themselves to the

waves.

Frederic Wilmer rose again; and Charles Stevens saw that wild, white uplifted face-the face that had beamed up along his path from boy into manhoodand his heart stood still for pity.

A moment more, and he had thrown down the oar, and sprung into the waves. He clutched the young merchant by his long hair, and beat out for the shore. It was a terrible struggle for life. Frederic was completely exhausted, and soon little more than a dead weight upon his friend; but courage and skill triumphed at last, and, thoroughly exhausted himself, Charles Stevens drew his friend upon the shore. "My husband! my husband! Is he drowned ?"

White as the dead were Marion Wilmer's lips as they asked this question, while she stood upon the wet sand, with the rain beating through her long, unbound hair.

The storm had roused her from her sleep, and she had rushed out on the piazza, straining her eyes for the large vessel, which was not in sight, and in which she fully believed her husband had sailed with the party. She observed the smaller

boat, and thought it was filled by a company of fishermen, who would understand managing it well enough. But her eyes were bent in another direction, and it was not until the swimmers nearly reached the shore, that they attracted her attention.

Suddenly a change came over her face. She grasped the railing of the piazza, and gazed with distended eyes and quivering lips on the two heads that one moment rose, and the next were buried under the spray.

It was some distance to the shore, and the young men reached it before she did, though she rushed almost like a spirit over the sharp rocks and wet sands.

"No, he'll revive soon; don't be alarmed!" said Charles Stevens to the frightened wife, and then fell down on the ground, overcome by his long struggle with the waves.

There was help at hand, and the two young men were conveyed to the hotel, and, in a short time, both were restored to consciousness, to learn that the storm had abated, and that both the boats had, after imminent peril, reached the shore.

It was evening, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilmer, with Charles Stevens, sat together in one of the chambers of the hotel.

"Charles, my dear old fellow, to think I owe my life to you!" said the young merchant, lifting up his pale face from the hand that rested on the arm of his chair, for he had not yet regained his strength. "There are debts too great for a man ever to cancel; there is a gratitude too deep for words. Charlie, what shall I say to you?"

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Nothing at all, Fred. It is enough of reward to me to think that I saved you."

"And to-night, if it were not for you, Charles" - she had never called him Charles before-"instead of sitting here by Fred's side, a happy, happy wife, I should have been —”

The lady could not finish the sentence, for the tears that sprung up from her heart into her eyes-those eyes that bent down on the young man, from their blue depths, a glance of gratitude that he thought repaid him fully for all he had done. He smiled lightly.

"You would have made a charming widow, certainly, Mrs. Wilmer; but, notwithstanding, I had rather see you a loving wife."

And then the memory of their recent neglect of Charles Stevens smote the heart of both husband and wife; but Marion felt it far more keenly of the two. She was an impulsive little woman, and, in her gratitude for the life more precious than her own, which he had saved, her pride entirely vanished, and she determined to confess the wrong she had done the preserver of her husband.

"I am very much ashamed of it, but I can't keep it back now," she said, turning round her tearful face, and flashing up through it her smiles on the young man ; "but I was really jealous of you, Charles, and-and when I gave my last party, I just didn't invite you, because I thought my husband would care less for me, if he loved you so much. It was very, very wicked, and God has punished me for this feeling; but still, if you knew what a young wife's tenderness is for her husband, you would not find it so hard to-to do what, with these tears of penitence and shame, I ask you now to do forgive

me."

"To be sure I will," answered the hearty tones of Charles Stevens, as he lifted the

Everything remained in his rooms much as they were when he left, only Ellen was not there! The scanty marketing of the morning was still in the market basket. What could it all mean? Where was Ellen? No trace of her could be found. At last he was informed, by the inmates of another aparment of the house, that between nine and ten o'clock a genteelly-dressed man and a short, dashy woman came to the door in a carriage, and that Ellen went away with them. Acquainted with city habits and city corruption, the truth at once flashed across the mind of the distracted father. Ellen had, without doubt, been decoyed by a couple of those execrated characters that infest our city and entrap the unwary. Such persons, when caught by these kidnappers of virtue, are forcibly detained until, disgraced in the eyes of men, degraded in their own estimation, and robbed of virtue, they shun the society of friends and home from which they were stolen.

"Mr. L. made diligent search for his lost daughter. He searched, however, in vain. The wretches who seduced her away had so completely covered their retreat, and secured their victim, that no knowledge of them, or of her, whatever, could be obtained. The father in despair was forced to give up his child as lost. Happy then would he have been to know that,

in innocence and purity, she was sleeping in the grave with her sister and mother. Disgusted with the world, he no longer asked of it either justice or mercy. He no longer sought employ ment or friends. Shutting himself up in his room, deprived mostly of air and food, he speedily became a prey to disease. Finding that he was about to die, he crawled into his little attic chamber, and there, alone and unseen, except by the all-seeing One, he gave up the ghost.

"What a chapter is this on man's inhumanity to man.' Let those rich men, who could give Mr. L. no assistance in the day of his adversity, ponder it well. A small portion of the money squandered in a foolish display would have saved a reputable business man from poverty and death; would have saved, in all probability, a wife and daughter from a premature grave; would have saved a lovely girl, just entering into womanhood, from a condition more dreadful than any other to which human beings can be reduced in this life. Selfishness is bound up in the hearts of the rich, and the destruction of the poor is their poverty. The rich care not for the poor."

The wrongs and sufferings of this family, thus briefly but graphically portrayed, `excited my emotions and harrowed up my feelings. The scene of all these sufferings was my own city, probably but a few blocks from my house, and might be in the very street on which I reside. Here, in this city of Bibles, and churches, and Christians, and Christian institutions, and ministers of Christ, and men of princely fortunes, a reputable man is doomed to poverty and death. He is so doomed, not because he is intemperate, not because he is indolent, not because he

is dishonest; but because, by the misfortunes or rascality of others, he loses his worldly possessions. Here his wife and daughter, unaccustomed to the privations and hardships of their forced circumstances, occupying small, ill-ventilated apartments, in a house, the nominal abode of twice or thrice the number of human beings that ought to dwell there, sicken and die of a loathsome disease. Here, in open day, a virtuous young woman is stolen, actually stolen, from her father's house, and confined in a prison of moral death. This is done, too, by men and women that are known to the officers of the city. In all probability some of these officers know the very house and room in which Ellen Longworth is confined. On the side of her captors and seducers, backed and employed by men of fashion and pleasure, is money. On the side of the victim is poverty. The father goes down to the grave in bitterness of soul, and the daughter, ignorant of his melancholy end, suffers on in her prisonhouse of moral pollution, while these officers, cognizant of the whole, riot with the money given them to close their eyes and seal their lips!

Great God! I exclaimed; are these things so, really so, in this Christian city? Unquestionably they are. And the sufferings and wrongs of the Longworth family are only the sufferings and wrongs, varying in unimportant circumstances, of hundreds of families in this community.

The question immediately rose in my mind whether, as the pastor of a congregation, and as a minister of Christ's Gospel, I had done all that Christ required of me, and all that the interests of humanity demanded at my hands to stay those corruptions and correct these and all other evils? I had preached well-studied and orthodox sermons. I had endeavored to instruct my people in the doctrines of the Bible.

These sermons I knew had been well received, had been complimented; indeed, some of them had been eulogized by the newspaper press, as both learned and eloquent. But, after all, the question forced itself upon me: Do my sermons make my hearers feel dissatisfied with themselves? Am I, I inquired, lifting up my voice against the injustice, the oppression, the hard heartedness of the world as Christ and the apostles did? Am I doing all in my power, in the pulpit as well as privately, to root out the abominations