WILLIAM'S NEW HOME.


Great was the change our poor boy experienced between living in the
country and in the city. Instead of the brightly flashing river, with
its sail-boats and schooners, the pleasant village environed by
verdant meadows and flower-filled gardens, there was nothing but long
rows of tall, stately houses, looking coldly grand, or narrow streets
and dark lanes, where mud and filth mixed together were suggestive of
cheerlessness and poverty. His heart sunk within him as he walked
along the busy streets, where many people were passing to and fro,
bent on their various errands of duty or pleasure, and felt that in
that hurrying crowd there was not one to care for him, and among that
wilderness of houses he had no home.

The shoemaker to whom he was apprenticed had once been a different man
from what he was at present. During Raymond's life, and while on terms
of intimacy with him, he had borne the reputation of a pious, and
certainly was an industrious and thrifty man; but failure and the loss
of an excellent wife had wrought a sad change in his character and
temper; and having married a second wife, who turned out a virago and
a shrew, there was little hope of his improving. He was still
industrious, and owing to his former reputation for honesty and doing
good work, he still retained many of his old customers. He had a small
shop in a public part of the city, where he took the measures for
shoes or sold those on hand; but he lived in a low-roofed,
comfortless-looking house, far down the city, where he had also a
shop, in which he kept a journeyman or two to do the mending, which
was all sent there.