her departed sceptre; but at what a price!  Her slave soon became her master.  Stimulus and stupefaction, physical exhaustion and mental horrors, the abandonment of friends and the brutality of a coarse and cruel husband, brought her at last to the day of reckoning.  She died, seven years after her marriage, in the delirium of opium.  There were physicians and servants around her, and an unloving husband waiting for the news of his release.  I think I would rather have died where Lettice did—­under the sky, with the solemn mountains lifting their heads in a perpetual prayer around me, and that faithful dog licking my hands, and mourning my wasted life.

Now, wherein did these two women differ?  One sinned through an intense and self-sacrificing love, and in obedience to the strongest calls of want.  Her sin, though it was beyond the pale of the world’s toleration, was yet one according to Nature.  The other, in a cold spirit of barter, voluntarily and deliberately exchanged her youth and beauty, the hopes of her own and another’s life, for carriages, jewels, fine clothing and a luxurious table.  She loathed the price she had to pay, and her sin was an unnatural one.  For this kind of prostitution, which religion blesses and society praises, there seems to be no redress; but for that which results as the almost inevitable sequence of one lapse of chastity we, the pious, the virtuous, the irreproachable, are all to blame.  Who or what make it impossible for them to retrace their steps?  Do they ever have reason to hope that the family hearth will be open to them if they go back?  Prodigal sons may return, and are welcomed with tears of joy and clasped by helping hands; but alas! how few parents would go to meet a sinning daughter.  Forgetting our Master’s precepts, forgetting our human frailty, forgetting our own weakness, we turn scornfully from the weeping Magdalen, and leave her “alone with the irreparable.”  Marriage is a holy and a necessary rite.  We would deprecate any loosening of this great house-band of society; but we do say that where it is the only distinction between two women, one of whom is an honored matron, and the other a Pariah and an outcast, there is “something in the world amiss”—­something beyond the cure of law or legislation, and that they can only be reached by the authority of a Christian press and the influence of Christian example.

THE STORY OF DAVID MORRISON.

I think it is very likely that many New Yorkers were familiar with the face of David Morrison.  It was a peculiarly guileless, kind face for a man of sixty years of age; a face that looked into the world’s face with something of the confidence of a child.  It had round it a little fringe of soft, light hair, and above that a big blue Scotch bonnet of the Rob Roryson fashion.

The bonnet had come with him from the little Highland clachan, where he and his brother Sandy had scrambled through a hard, happy boyhood together.  It had sometimes been laid aside for a more pretentious headgear, but it had never been lost; and in his old age and poverty had been cheerfully—­almost affectionately—­resumed.