scene,--save that on a chair by the bedside lay a profusion of long,
glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from the head of the sufferer
when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but which, with a jealousy
that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain heart, she had seized and
insisted on retaining near her; and save that, by the fire, perfectly
inattentive to the event about to take place within the chamber, and to
which we of the biped race attach so awful an importance, lay a large
gray cat, curled in a ball, and dozing with half-shut eyes, and ears that
now and then denoted, by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or
nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses. The dying woman did
not at first attend to the entrance either of Dummie or the female at the
foot of the bed, but she turned herself round towards the child, and
grasping his arm fiercely, she drew him towards her, and gazed on his
terrified features with a look in which exhaustion and an exceeding
wanness of complexion were even horribly contrasted by the glare and
energy of delirium.

"If you are like _him_," she muttered, "I will strangle you,--I will!
Ay, tremble, you ought to tremble when your mother touches you, or when
_he_ is mentioned. You have his eyes, you have! Out with them,
out,--the devil sits laughing in them! Oh, you weep, do you, little one?
Well, now, be still, my love; be hushed! I would not harm thee! Harm
--0 God, he _is_ my child after all!" And at these words she clasped the
boy passionately to her breast, and burst into tears.

"Coom, now, coom," said Dummie, soothingly; "take the stuff, Judith, and
then ve'll talk over the hurchin!"

The mother relaxed her grasp of the boy, and turning towards the speaker,
gazed at him for some moments with a bewildered stare; at length she