time to time, and after months of hopelessness and pain, must have bounded
from that barrier, into the joy of liberty and life. My feelings had
become in some way mastered by what I had seen, and all about my heart was
disturbance and unseemly effeminacy. There was only one individual,
besides myself, walking in the narrow court-yard, which, but for our
footsteps, would have been as silent as a grave. This was a woman--a
beggar--carrying, as usual, a child, that drew less sustenance than sorrow
from the mother's breast. She was in rags, but she looked clean, and she
might once have been beautiful; but settled trouble and privation had
pressed upon her hollow eye--had feasted on her bloomy skin. I could not
tell her age. With a glance I saw that she was old in suffering. And what
was her business here? For whom did _she_ wait? Was it for the father of
that child?--and was she so satisfied of her partner's innocence, and the
justice of mankind, that here she lingered to receive him, assured of
meeting him again? What was his crime?--his character?--her history? I
would have given much to know, indeed, I was about to question her, when I
was startled and detained by the drawing of a bolt--the opening of the
door--and the appearance of the very man whom I had come to see. He did
not perceive me. He perceived nothing but the mother and the child--_his_
wife and _his_ child. She ran to him, and sobbed on his bosom. He said
nothing. He was calm--composed; but he took the child gently from her
arms, carried the little thing himself to give her ease, and walked on.
She at his side, weeping ever; but he silent, and not suffering himself to
speak, save when a word of tenderness could lull the hungry child, who
cried for what the mother might not yield her. Still without a specific
object, I followed the pair, and passed with them into the most ancient
and least reputable quarter of the city. They trudged from street to
street, through squalid courts and lanes, until I questioned the propriety
of proceeding, and the likelihood of my ever getting home again. At
length, however, they stopped. It was a close, narrow, densely peopled