“I have no change, nothing less than this three-dollar bill.  Suppose I pay you by the month hereafter; it will save me a great deal of trouble, and I will try to give you your dollar a month regularly.”

Phoebe’s pale cheek waxed still more ghastly as Mrs. Percy spoke, but it was not within that lady’s province to notice the colour of a washerwoman’s face.  She did, however, observe her lingering, weary steps as she proceeded through the yard, and conscience whispered some reproaches, which were so unpleasant and unwelcome, that she endeavoured to dispel them by turning to the luxurious supper which was spread before her.  And here I would pause to observe, that whatever method may be adopted to reconcile the conscience to withholding money so justly due, so hardly earned, she disobeyed the positive injunction of that God who has not left the time of payment optional with ourselves, but who has said—­“The wages of him that is hired, shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.”—­Lev. 19 chap. 13th verse.

The husband of Phoebe was a day labourer; when not intoxicated he was kind; but this was of rare occurrence, for most of his earnings went for ardent spirits, and the labour of the poor wife and mother was the main support of herself and four children—­the eldest nine years, the youngest only eighteen months old.  As she neared the wretched hovel she had left early in the morning, she saw the faces of her four little ones pressed close against the window.

“Mother’s coming, mother’s coming!” they shouted, as they watched her approaching through the gloom, and as she unlocked the door, which she had been obliged to fasten to keep them from straying away, they all sprang to her arms at once.

“God bless you, my babes!” she exclaimed, gathering them to her heart, “you have not been a minute absent from my mind this day.  And what have you suffered,” she added, clasping the youngest, a sickly, attenuated-looking object, to her breast.  “Oh! it is hard, my little Mary, to leave you to the tender mercies of children hardly able to take care of themselves.”  And as the baby nestled its head closer to her side, and lifted its pale, imploring face, the anguished mother’s fortitude gave way, and she burst into an agony of tears and sobbings.  By-the-by, do some mothers, as they sit by the softly-lined cradles of their own beloved babes, ever think upon the sufferings of those hapless little ones, many times left with a scanty supply of food, and no fire, on a cold winter day, while the parent is earning the pittance which is to preserve them from starvation?  And lest some may suppose that we are drawing largely upon our imagination, we will mention, in this place, that we knew of a child left under such circumstances, and half-perishing with cold, who was nearly burned to death by some hops (for there was no fuel to be found), which it scraped together in its ragged apron, and set on fire with a coal found in the ashes.