suffering among the poorer classes, arising from a scarcity of employment and the high prices of provisions, but more than all from the increasing vice of intemperance.
Even women sometimes partook freely of the intoxicating draught which their husbands were much more lavish to provide than food, and which often served as a stimulus to take its place. These were exceptional cases, however, as there were comparatively few women so lost to all sense of duty as mothers to debase themselves thus.
Pinched by cold and hunger, and tortured by abuse, it was marvelous that they had the ambition to try to appear respectable, and the perseverance to labor so untiringly to guard their children against the ill effects of the vices their fathers taught them.
Thus Rosalind thought who often accompanied her mother to these abodes of wretchedness and poverty, but whose mind was not in a state to be profited thereby, and Mrs. Claremont ceased at length to take her with her, fearing to increase her morbid tendency to dwell on the dark side.
Among those associated with Mrs. Claremont in this work, was a young lady whose overflowing zeal in all those tender charities that constitute such a charm in budding womanhood cast a beneficent halo around her presence in every circle, and commanded the respect of the most thoughtless by her unaffected interest in the lowly and unfortunate. As beautiful in person as she was lovely in character, she might have been envied as a rival but for the entire absence of self consciousness and the unobtrusive manners
