out two nights; two nights by the watch, stranger. I'm cold, I tell you; I have not seen a fire for eight hours. As God made you, stranger, where can I get warm ? Two more gentlemen come up, stop, and one asks what the matter is. "O, the man's only drunk!" cries his friend. “Come along, or the muffins will be burnt." They pass on. John Scott looks after them, and mutters something about their being burnt one day. While his eyes are wandering, the person first addressed, feeling himself unable to do any thing, pushes for home. John, muttering curses, and prayers, and promises of amendment, staggers up the street.

Soon after dark he was picked up from the middle of the street (where two or three persons had poked him with their canes to see what the matter was, and concluded he was "only drunk "), and taken to a tavern, by a young, chickenhearted clerk, who was such an enemy to temperance as to pity an intemperate man.

SEVENTH SCene.

A small, dark room, unplastered; the crevices of the walls pasted over with leaves from the Bible. A small fire of pine boards (it is late in February). Two men sit by a table playing some game of chance by the light of a candle stuck in a knot-hole. One is John Scott, the other Mike Simmons. Mike was once a boatman, hale and handsome ; he is still handsome, but dying of consumption. He was once honest, sober, industrious; he is now a drunkard, gambler, idler, and lives by stealing logs from the saw-mills and lumber from rafts. He keeps a child at a pay school.

The door opens, and Mike's wife enters, red in the face, and reeling. She places a jug on the table, and from a heap of crockery and old shoes pulls out a bowl and washes it in the water bucket. Drinking begins. Mike has a job on hand, and wants his wife out of the way; for even such women as she have hearts, and pity the victims in whose

midst they walk. The woman is drenched, and thrown into the heap of straw, bedclothes, and children in the corner. The children cry out, and wriggle from under their mother; one squirms out of bed, and is kicked back by the father.

Family matters settled, Mike goes on with his game. John Scott is kept on the verge of entire drunkenness by the whiskey, and prevented from going over by well-told tales of theft, robbery, and bloodshed,—exciting enough to rouse him from complete lethargy. About ten a third man enters, after a mysterious tap at the window. The three draw together and speak under their breath.

:

The results of that consultation are not yet evident, but at such moments bold deeds of evil are planned. By some such deed John Scott may yet prove that, when drunk in the street, his case was not that of "only drunk," but that of one hanging between a return to right and destruction. Even now, breathing this tainted atmosphere of whiskey and onions, in which the very candle burns dim, John thinks of his mother! O, were some friend by to help the poor struggling wretch! There is none. Satan smiles at his elbow, and, opposite, Mike smiles in answer, little dreaming that his dear friend and gossip, the Tempter, is exchanging grins with the Death which is now looking from his own sunken and swimming eyes.

THE LOST CHILD.

It has been said that the morals of a city depend very much upon the manner in which it is laid out; if irregular, and full of alleys, lanes, and courts, there will inevitably be more of filth and iniquity therein, than if it be open, regular, and airy. High houses and narrow passage-ways seem to breed vicious habits, as dark crevices do foul insects; at any rate, they give shelter and shade. The ideal of a city would be realized when every passage-way was made broad and easy of access. It is an error, therefore, to build a town in squares, for the interiors of the squares become always, in a greater or less degree, sinks.

The mistake in the plan of Cincinnati, then, was, that the main squares are not traversed by large passage-ways; and many, that seem without noble and fine, are within foul and terrible to look upon. Under the very windows of the most beautiful and comfortable dwelling-houses of our city are some of the most miserable hovels in existence, unnoticed, because in the interior of a square.

In the door-way of an old wooden house, which stands, unseen by the passer-by in the street, in the midst of one of the fine squares of Cincinnati, a white woman, of some thirty years old, sat looking stupidly at the golden sky of the west. The beauty of God's heaven soothed and interested her, though she knew not what influence it was that calmed

her spirit. The house was miserably dilapidated; not a window remained whole; the weather-boarding was broken, and the chimney in ruins. Close to the feet of the sitting woman, the hogs were quarrelling for some remnants of her last meal; and upon the ash-heap by her side, a little girl, about four years old, was playing with a yellow, scabby dog. Within, a straw-bed lay in a corner, and a block of wood from some lumber-yard contrasted strangely with a bureau veneered with showy mahogany.

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Mother,” cried out a ragged and dirt-streaked boy, who came up kicking his furless fur cap before him,

ain't nowhere.”

"John

"He is," said the woman, without moving her eyes from the sky; "and if you don't fetch him in quick, mind your

self."

The boy gave the dog one kick, that brought forth a simultaneous howl from cur and child, and strolled out into the street again.

The twilight faded; the stars looked down upon the seething city, and through the stillness of evening the boatman's song rose from the sluggish river, and was listened to by many an ear far up town. The lady, leaning from her open window, heard it, and ceased fanning herself to catch the hearty tones; the gentleman, rocking in his piazza, heard it, and his cigar went out as his head kept time with the quick, full notes; the servant-girl caught the sound, and stood, cup and towel in hand, drinking in what reminded her of one who was braving the fever in the Southwest; the poor woman sitting on the threshold of that old frame-house heard that song also, and years were annihilated by it, and she laid her head down upon her greasy apron, and cried as the fallen alone ever do. While the fit was still on her, the boy whom she had sent out came back again, sullen and fierce. "He ain't to be had," said he.

“Who? John? Where ain't he? Who've you seen? What 've you done? Answer me, Bill,— is John lost?" "For all I know," said the boy.

The woman caught up her little girl, threw her, screaming, into an inner room, cast a shawl over her head, and, seizing her sullen boy by the arm, walked out into Vine Street.

"Now where did you see him last, Bill?" she said, pausing on the sidewalk.

"Down there," he growled, pointing to the opposite square, which was nearly vacant.

Letting go of her son's arm, the woman began her search among the lumber-piles where the lost child had been last seen; while Bill shuffled along to a coffee-house close by, where a store-breaker was just then consulting with his companions, and a young carpenter, fresh from New Hampshire, was trying to smile as he drank his dose of whiskey and water with a new bosom friend.

The clock of the Second Church struck eight; the groups about the corners were thinner; the laugh and shout and oath were less frequent; more lights were seen in upper windows; the active and faithful were going to their beds. More than one man, during the evening, had swung along to that old house in the centre of the square, had called for "Bet" and "Betsey" and "Bet Fowler," and, having no answer, had sworn and slammed the door, and swung away again. Now and then the little girl in the inner room had wakened, and whimpered a little, and sunk to sleep again; and once during the hour preceding eight, Bill had crept in silently, and placed something in, or taken something from, a drawer of the bureau. The clock of the Second Church struck eight, and people in Fourth Street, having counted the strokes, were just about to talk again, when the bell of the public cryer stopped all tongues: "A child found," shouted that functionary, "five years old; blue eyes, one