The light breeze, as it sways the loose heavy tresses, wafts to her ear a strain of distant music. All the drowsy afternoon it has been playing, lost almost entirely at first in the busy hum of the streets and in the long lull of the lazy wind--a strain only caught at rare intervals when the breeze is strong enough to bear it to her. It has been slowly approaching as the hours creep on, advancing a few steps at a time. Ballads and simple ditties, dances, waltzes, grand old marches! with that unaccountable attraction for trifles which the mind often experiences in its hours of suffering, mechanically, one after another, she has traced them all. Now the varied tones cease to pervade the atmosphere, and there is a long resting pause. When the music begins again, it is on the pavement, almost beneath the window, and the old musician, perhaps unconsciously wrought upon by the silent influence of the hour, has merged from the gay to the pathetic, and plays only sad little pieces in the minor key. Presently from the multitude of sweet sounds there arises on the air a song lower and sadder than the others--a strange, pathetic melody, falling on the ear like a low, plaintive wail, broken by keen throbs of agony: her whole nature beats in responsive echo. O God! gone so far down the dreary road which has darkly led her from that time of purity and peace when that song was nightly sung to her; after so many weary years of sin and suffering, to hear those notes again! It is but a simple thing which has the power so to move her, a mere nothing; half dirge, half hymn, familiar to her long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood in its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble, womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her now, pale, wan, and spectre-like. Oh! to sit down, side by side with her former self; to see herself as she used to be before the tempter crept into the Eden of her heart; to look despairingly up to the height whence she had fallen, so wrecked in moral strength that she had not the power to retrace a single step! Peace departed, virtue lost, health undermined, affection squandered, ruthlessly murdering the peace of one whose life through all the time of its sad earth-sojourning is linked with hers; cursing the home she should have blessed and brightened, making of that fair garden, wherein sweet domestic graces should have bloomed and blossomed as the rose, but a desolate and barren waste, knowing that hearts, little hearts, that had drawn their life-beat from her own, had starved and sickened for the love which is their rightful food;--with senses bleared and deadened, she had heard them piteously wailing but for a morsel of that bread of life without which even the footsteps of the self-reliant, the strong and brave of heart, faint and falter by the way, and she had cruelly denied them that precious nutriment; she had given them life, but had robbed them of all that makes life endurable. Life's duties unfulfilled, life's high and holy aims trampled under the foot of sensual indulgence, living to blight instead of to bless! O woman, wife, and mother, thy life when lived aright a crucifixion of the flesh, a sublime self-sacrifice--not for thee the pleasures of sense and time, not for thee may peal earth's songs of triumph! Fainting oft beneath the burden of the cross, we trace thy way by bloody footprints, suffering as a saint;--falling from thy estate, how terrible will be thy retribution as a sinner!