we hear the musical stir of the night wind among boughs and branches of luxuriant foliage, while ever and anon it comes from afar with a deep-toned, solemn murmur, as though it swept o'er forests of cedar and mournfully-echoing pine. Still roaming on, the low rippling of flowing waters comes soothingly to our ears, and we pause on the bank of a flower-bordered river that goes sweetly singing on its way to the distant ocean. A tiny sailboat lies in a sheltering cove, rocked gently to and fro by the swaying current. On a hill beyond the stream we mark a large white-belfried building, relieved against a dark background of wide-stretching timber-land. And turning our delighted footsteps down an avenue of lofty cedar and linden trees, there rises at length before our vision a splendid mansion, built after a most beautiful style of architecture, with deep, bay windows, long corridors and vine-covered terraces. Magnificent gardens, displaying the perfection of taste, lay sloping to the southward. On the east the silvery river was seen glancing through the shrubbery that adorned its banks. To the west lay a beautiful park and pleasure ground, while far away to the northward stretched the deep, dense forest, tall, dark and sombre.

And over all this lovely scene the stars shed their mild, ethereal light. O, Wimbledon! art thou not beautiful 'neath their soft, silver gleams? And doth not shadowy-vested romance roam thy grassy paths and flower-strewn ways to-night, and with her wild, mysterious eyes gloating on thy entrancing scenery, doth she not resolve to dwell awhile, 'mid thy embowering vines, thy dewy-petalled flowers, mournfully-musical cedar-groves, and web a fiction from the thousand tangled threads which complicate and ramify thy social life?

We shall see what we shall see in Wimbledon; for gray dawn is already breaking in the dappled east, and a man, closely buttoned to the chin in a gray overcoat, emerges from a large brick mansion on the outskirts of the village, and directs his steps toward an old, black, rickety-looking house, which stands just on the bank of the river, surrounded by a tangled growth of brush-wood.

Here the gairish day at length disclosed what the modest night had obscured with her diamond veil of stars. Squalid poverty glared through the broken window-panes, and want seemed clattering her doleful song on the flying clapboards and crazy casements. A feeble, struggling light from within showed the inmates were stirring as the man in the overcoat gave a loud, careless thump on the trembling door, which was opened by a pale, gaunt-looking urchin, clad in garments bearing patches of divers hues.

"Is your mother at home, Bill?" inquired the man, gruffly.

"Yes, sir," answered the boy in a meek tone; "will you please to walk in, Mr. Pimble?"

"No; tell her I want her to come and wash for me to-day," said the man, in a harsh, rough voice, as he turned away.

The boy bowed and reëntered the miserable apartment, where a few soggy chips smoked on a bed of embers that were gathered in the corner of a huge fire-place. A woman, with a begrimed cotton handkerchief tied over her head, sat on the hearth endeavoring to blow them into a blaze, while the smoke, that poured down the foul and blackened chimney, caused the tears to roll from her eyes, and baffled her efforts.

"Never mind the fire, mother," said the lad, approaching; "I'll try and pick up some dry sticks in course of the day to have the room warm when you come home to-night. Mr. Pimble has just called, and wants you to go and wash for him to-day."

"He won't pay me a cent if I go," answered the woman moodily; "all my drudgery for that family goes to pay the rent of this miserable old shell."

"I think he will give you something to-day, mother, if you tell him how needy we are," suggested the boy.

"Never a cent," said the woman, with a gloomy shake of her head; "however, I may as well go. I shall get a cup of tea and bit of dinner, and I'll look out to bring you a cake, Willie."

"O, will you, mother?" exclaimed the boy, his wan features brightening momentarily at the prospect of a single cake to appease the gnawings of hunger.

The woman threw a coarse, threadbare blanket over her shoulders and went forth, while the boy bent his way along the riverbank in search of dry twigs and branches with which to replenish their wasted stock of fuel. And he thought, as he picked up here and there the scanty sticks and laid them in small bundles, of some lines of poetry he read on a bit of newspaper that blew across his path one day:

And he could not settle the point in his youthful mind. He could not tell why David Pimble should go to school the year round at the great, white seminary on the hill, while he could only go about two months in the cold, biting winter to a town-school a mile distant. He could not tell why said David should have warm woollen jackets, while his were threadbare and patched with rags; nor why David should fare sumptuously on buttered toast and smoking muffins, while he starved on the crusts that were cast from his well-spread table.

All these were knotty points which poor little Willie Danforth was too young and untaught to solve. When he should be older and wiser, would he be able to solve them? He didn't know;—he hoped so; though he feared he never would be much wiser than now, if he was always to remain so poor, and be debarred from the privilege of attending school.

There's one school whose doors are and have ever been open wide for Willie—the school of poverty and experience. Lessons swift and bitter are indelibly impressed on the minds of the pupils there.

Thoughtful and abstracted, Willie wandered along, gathering his little bundles of firewood, till he found himself at the foot of the hill on which stood the great, white seminary where David Pimble, his brother and sister, went to school month after month and year after year. He heard voices, and, looking up, beheld the little group that were occupying his thoughts, on the hill-top, laughing and mocking at him as he toiled along with his bundles of sticks. His cheeks glowed with anger for a moment, and then grew ashy pale, as he plodded on toward his miserable home.

Dilly Danforth, the poor washerwoman, had seen better days; but the drunken dissipation of a husband, who was now in his grave, had reduced her to abject, despairing poverty. Her unfortunate marriage and persistence in clinging to the man of her choice, and enduring all his abuses, excited the displeasure of her family, and they cast her from them to suffer and struggle on as best she might. She knew not as she had a relative in the world. She surely had no friend, save Willie, her little boy, with whom she dwelt in the comfortless abode we have briefly visited.

Alas for the suffering poor! How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from their pitiful tales of want and destitution!

CHAPTER II.

Tap, tap, tap, on the back kitchen door of Esq. Pimble's great brick mansion, and a clattering of plates and tea things within which quite drowned the timid knock. A second and louder one brought a fat, red-faced woman with rolled-up sleeves and a dish-towel in hand, to answer the summons.

"Sakes, Dilly Danforth!" exclaimed she, on beholding the well-known, faded blanket of the washerwoman; "what brings you here so airly in the mornin'? If you are after cold victuals, I can tell you you can't have any, for mistress—"

"I am not come seeking charity," said Dilly, cutting short the woman's brawling speech;