“They have come, Constance! they have come.  Think of me as at rest and happy.  I die in peace!”

His eye-lids closed naturally—­there was no longer any convulsive play of the muscles, and as an infant sinking into slumber, so quietly did Theodore Wilmer sleep the sleep of death.

One month from that night of sorrow, the darkest one in the many gloomy seasons of Mrs. Wilmer’s life, might have been seen this child of many afflictions, with her three little ones, at home in one of the most pleasant houses in the vicinity of New York.  There was something sad and subdued in the expression of her pale face, but it was from the recollection of the past.  Her mother, who ten years before had cast her off as unworthy, now gazed upon her with a look of the intensest affection; and the father, who had sworn never to call her his child, sat holding her thin white hand in his, and listening to her first recital of all she had passed through since she left the home of her childhood, while the tears fell from his eyes in large drops, upon the hand that lay within his own.

THE SISTERS.

[THE following unadorned narrative, the reminiscence of a friend, I give as if related by him from whom I received it.  He was, in early years, the apprentice of a tradesman, in whose family the principal incidents occurred.  The picture presented is one of every-day life.]

MR. WILLIAMS, to whom, when a boy, I was apprenticed to learn the art and mystery by which he supported a pretty large family, was not rich, although, by industry and economy, he had gathered together a few thousand dollars, and owned, besides, two or three neat little houses, the aggregate annual rent of which was something like six hundred dollars.  His wife, a weak-minded woman, however, considered him independent, in regard to wealth, and valued herself accordingly.  Few held their heads higher, or trode the pavement with a statelier step than Mrs. Williams.

An elder sister, greatly her superior in every quality of mind, had been far less fortunate in her marriage.  She was the wife of a man, who, instead of increasing his worldly goods, the fruit of some twenty years’ prudence and industry, had become dissipated, and at the time now referred to, was sinking rapidly, and bearing his family, of course, down with him.  All energy seemed lost, and though his family was steadily increasing, he grew more and more careless every day.

He spent much time in taverns, and wasted there a good deal of money, that his family needed.  Mrs. Haller, his wife, was, as has been said, in intelligence and feeling, much the superior of Mrs. Williams, but appeared to little advantage in her peculiar situation.  She was the elder sister, by four or five years.  At the time of which I am now writing, Mrs. Haller had five children, two of them grown up, and the rest small.  Her husband had become so indolent and