When Mrs. Warburton was sufficiently at ease to examine her child, she found her a pitiable object indeed.  Her face, neck, and body were dreadfully scalded, and her back was in scars and welts all over, and in some places with the skin broken and festering.  It appeared, from the statement of the child, that the woman she lived with had placed on her head a bucket of scalding water for her to carry to a store, which she was going to scrub out.  The heavy weight on her head caused her to lose her balance and fall, when the whole contents of the bucket were spilled over her face and neck, and penetrated through her clothes to the skin, in all directions.

Of course, she was suffering the most excruciating pain.  Medical aid was called in by the magistrate, and every attention extended to the little sufferer, who seemed to forget her pain in the consciousness of her mother’s presence.  The inhuman wretch who had thus brutally maltreated a mere child, enraged to a state of insanity in finding herself thwarted in obtaining the child, made an appeal to the city court, then in session, and had all the parties present.  It needed but this to give Mrs. W. uncontrolled possession of little Mary.  The condition in which the court found the child, added to the touching story of her mother, caused an instant cancelling of the indenture by which the unfeeling woman claimed possession of her.

In a few days after, Mrs. Warburton found her boy, who, much to her satisfaction, had a good place, with which he was pleased, and was learning a good trade.  She was now fairly started again, and as her spirits revived, her health became much improved.  Month after month passed away, and brought with it new sources of comfort, new causes for satisfaction.  Of her husband, she now thought with no affection.  It is true, earlier feelings would sometimes return, but with no force, and after moving the waters of her quiet spirit for a moment, would tremble into rest.

When a man once extinguishes his own self-respect, he is a burden to society.  But when a husband and father descends so low, he becomes a curse to his family.  After abusing them, and making their condition so wretched that even he cannot share it, he will forsake the wife of his bosom and the children of his early love, and leave them to the tender mercies of strangers.  But let the mother gather her little ones around her, and by toiling early and late, make their condition comfortable, and the brutalized wretch will return and consume the food of his children, and abuse them if they complain.

A year had passed away, when early one evening in the fall of the year, a man pushed open the door of the room she occupied, and with a “well Julia,” took a chair, and made himself at home without further ceremony.  Though dirty and ragged, with a beard of a week’s growth, and half drunk, Mrs. Warburton could not mistake the form of her wretched husband.

“O, husband! can this be you?”