Think of the poor old soul trailing about the world, trying to "scratch a living" for herself and her daughter by washing; and having to hurry home from her labour to attend to that sick girl through eleven long years.

Such a life is a good deal like a slow funeral.

It is struggling for a few breaths more, with the worms crawling over you.

And yet I am told that the old woman was not accustomed to "make a poor mouth," as the saying goes.

How true it is that "a great many people in this world have only one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences, namely--to waste away and die." Our next visit was to an Irish family.