the daughter, a girl of some sixteen years old, being in the fray, and her blows were directly aimed at her parents. Tired out at last, each separated as if by mutual consent, and fell in groups upon the floor, and all were soon asleep. Such a sleep!* During the evening, the hopeful daughter whose outrageous intoxication was in part only feigned, arose very quietly, and in a few moments transferred the contents of her father's pockets to herself—and in fifteen minutes after I was changed at the door of a ball room, or rather at the bar of a tavern; beyond which a whole suite of rooms were used for many and nefarious purposes-the house or rather establishment, was celebrated in the annals of roguery as being a receptacle for stolen goods. The keeper and owner was one of those kind of men who indulged occasionally in the more desperate games of chance. It was upon one of these chance occasions I fell into the hands of a young men of poor though respectable parents, in the country-their whole souls were entirely wrapped up in this, their only son; the aged, anxious mother, read his letters with a mother's joy, and the good old soul would turn her beaming eye on her partner, and speak of her dear William, the pride and ornament of her family. "Ah," she exclaimed, "he is a blessed child, and we can go down to our graves with the consolation of having done our duty—and that our affections have been fully requited." He was apprenticed at an early age to a merchant in the city, and was always held in high estimation by his employer, and beloved by his only daughter, a beautiful girl of eighteen. Her affection became known to him too latereformation stood on the throw of a dice, for to recover and * A fact replace five hundred dollars stolen from his employer, he had recourse once more to the gaming table-the consequence was that on the evening he left the room, I was the only solitary companion of the crumbs, thread and stitches of his pocket; he muttered to himself some incoherent words, and hurried along the street as if a troop of fiends were at his heels. The night was dark, the winds whistled, and the tall trees sighed, the watchman had called the hour of twelve--still he walked rapidly on, and in a few minutes he stood on the wharf. The deep waters of the Delaware rolled along, the tall masts of the ships cracked, and the ropes rattled against each other, making a strange and fearful sound. For a moment the wretched young man gazed upwards, his hands were raised toward heaven-his lips moved-thoughts deep and damning rushed up from the deep recesses of his soul, they pictured his crimes--he screamed and with one fearful bound he plunged into the river! That night--his poor mother, thought of her absent son, and knelt down at her bedside, and in the fulness of her heart prayed for his safety and happiness. My sensations while in the water had nothing of that kind so frequently described by half drowned men--on the contrary, I lay as snug in his empty pocket as if in a trunk upon terra firma. The body was not discovered until late in the day, when an old gentleman, owner of nearly fifty houses independent of lots, bank stock, railroad stock, &c. &c., espying a man in the water, immediately brought him ashore, and while sympathising over the unfortunate youth, with tears of pity in his eyes, actually picked his pocket! and walked off to inform the coroner--saying as he trudged along, "I may as well have it as another." This sophistical reasoning has brought many a man to the gallows. This gentleman, however, is rather too rich for so exalted a station among the children of men. So away I went with my new master. The hypocrisy of this man was great, and I soon found out, that so far from being honest, he had accumulated his money by the most nefarious means. He had a daughter of some sixteen summers old, whose ill-governed mind promised to end in some disgraceful and irredeemable action. She was incessantly teasing her father for money, which she spent in the purchase of indecent and immoral books. Fortunately for me I was saved this mental prostitution, being given to John, the hostler, for some piece of service rendered, the nature of which I was never able to find out. There seemed to be a very friendly, if not a very tender feeling existing between these two, and to such an extent did they carry this romantic passion, that they ran away together, taking me as a matter of course along with them. I did not stay long with this ill-matched pair-for the ignorance and brutality of John was more than she could bear, and I was given by her to a coachman for conveying her to one of those houses, the refuge of lost virtue, sacrificed at the shrine of passion. The coachman was a jovial fellow, and had a busy day of it, and returned to his employer with twenty-five dollars. But how was I shocked, when this most seeming honest fellow gave him but fifteen, saying "business was dull." That night the ten dollars was spent in a brothel. I could not help moralizing on the wickedness and folly of mankind; here was one who would steal ten or twenty dollars from his employer, and lavish it away in the greatest extravagance. But I was young and unacquainted with the world, and an old Spanish dollar informed me that he found extravagance for dress, and love of fashion, two of the chief causes of crime. He was a wise dollar, and gave me some curious hints, and much sage advice. He had once been in the possession of General George Washington. Oh! what a character he gave of that truly great man. -Would that I had existed in the days of the Revolution. LEAF TWENTY-SIXTH. We devote this leaf to a pleasing subject, one in which we are all interested, so much so, that if we were deprived of the blessing heaven has given us, the world would be a wilderness, and man a creature. It is— WOMAN. "She's a golden sentence, Writ by our Maker; which the angels may There is no subject in the world more pleasant to dwell upon than that of woman. The more we contemplate their virtues their beauties-their patience, and their unchanging love-the more we are convinced that they are something more than earth, and little less than angels. A history of woman from the earliest ages of the world would embrace all the noble actions and deeds that have graced the pages of the historian, and stand forth in bold relief from all the rest.-There has no important event occurred, but woman is more or less connected with it. If we turn to the classic pages of Roman history, we find there the most beautiful pictures and delineations of the female character. It is not the chaste Lucretia alone that would attract the attention, nor would it be Valeria, sister of the famed Valerius Poplicolo, or Volumnia, the stern, resolute mother of Coriolanus, who stemmed the torrent of popular fury in Rome, when virtue itself would have been basely sacrificed at the shrine of political fury and blinded ambition; nor would it be the many whose names are handed down to us as the primitive supporters of all republics, and the advocates, as well as the promulgators of every virtue in earth's moral calender; nor would it be the Helen of Troy, or the heroic Antoinette of France; but it would be in all-all -summed up in the one single word-WOMAN! It strikes us that, at the present day woman is not fully appreciated, it seems as if she was treated too much as a plaything, to be thrown idly by. It was not so in the glorious days of chivalry, when "A lordly knight came o'er the plain, to lay his trophies at the feet of his lady love. In those truly romantic days women ruled supreme, and their very word would bring a monarch "down from his sumptuous throne" to kiss their lily hands. Degenerated as we are in many things at the present age, it becomes not us as men, to lessen the claims fond woman has upon us. "Give them," says a learned writer, “ power over us, governed by love and affection, and we will shun many of the vices flesh is heir to."" This writer is correct, and the reader will please remember that he does not |