He was asleep.

Placing the tray she had brought upon a table, Mrs.Howland lifted the child in her arms, and as she did so, he murmured in a sad voice-- "Don't, papa! oh, don't strike so hard!" Unable to repress her feelings, the mother's tears gushed over her cheeks, and her bosom heaved with emotions that spent themselves in sobs and moans.
For many minutes she sat thus.

But the child slept on.

Once or twice she tried to awake him, that he might get the supper she had brought; but he slept on soundly, and she refrained, unwilling to call him back to the grief of mind she felt that consciousness would restore.

Undressing him, at length, she laid him in his bed, and bending over his precious form in the deeper darkness that had now fallen, lifted her heart, and prayed that God would keep him from evil.