One night, as Maxwell entered her apartment, he found her kneeling at her bed-side, supplicating in prayer.  The word, “Oh, God; not me, but my child-guide her through the perils that are before her, and receive her into heaven at last,” fell upon his ear.  He paused, gazed upon her as if some angel spirit had touched the tenderest chord of his feelings-listened unmoved.  A lovely woman, an affectionate mother, the offspring of a noble race,—­herself forced by relentless injustice to become an instrument of licentiousness-stood before him in all that can make woman an ornament to her sex.  What to Ellen Juvarna seemed the happiness of her lot, was pain and remorse to Clotilda; and when she arose there was a nervousness, a shrinking in her manner, betokening apprehension.  “It is not now; it is hereafter.  And yet there is no glimmer of hope!” she whispers, as she seats herself in a chair, pulls the little curtain around the bed, and prepares to retire.

The scene so worked upon Maxwell’s feelings that he could withstand the effect no longer; he approached her, held out his hand, greeted her with a smile:  “Clotilda, I am your friend,” he whispers, “come, sit down and tell me what troubles you!”

“If what I say be told in confidence?” she replied, as if questioning his advance.

“You may trust me with any secret; I am ready to serve you, if it be with my life!”

Clasping her arms round her child, again she wept in silence.  The moment was propitious—­the summer sun had just set beneath dark foliage in the west, its refulgent curtains now fading into mellow tints; night was closing rapidly over the scene, the serene moon shone softly through the arbour into the little window at her bedside.  Again she took him by the hand, invited him to sit down at her side, and, looking imploringly in his face, continued,—­“If you are a friend, you can be a friend in confidence, in purpose.  I am a slave! yes, a slave; there is much in the word, more than most men are disposed to analyse.  It may seem simple to you, but follow it to its degraded depths-follow it to where it sows the seeds of sorrow, and there you will find it spreading poison and death, uprooting all that is good in nature.  Worse than that, my child is a slave too.  It is that which makes the wrong more cruel, that mantles the polished vice, that holds us in that fearful grasp by which we dare not seek our rights.

“My mother, ah! yes, my mother"-Clotilda shakes her head in sorrow.  “How strange that, by her misfortune, all, all, is misfortune for ever! from one generation to another, sinking each life down, down, down, into misery and woe.  How oft she clasped my hand and whispered in my ear:  ‘If we could but have our rights.’  And she, my mother,—­as by that sacred name I called her-was fair; fairer than those who held her for a hideous purpose, made her existence loathsome to herself, who knew the right but forced the wrong.  She once had rights, but was stripped of them; and once in slavery who can ask that right be done?”