Would that I had died that happy evening,
Ere your arms unclasped their strong embrace,—
Died—before your lips had spoken coldly,
Or the love had faded from your face!
I can feel you clasp my cloak around me,
Looking deep into my eyes the while:
How, when in your heart you meant to leave me,
Could you look with such a tender smile?
Yet I would not change a single moment
Of that blessed summer by the sea,
Not to know my future should be cloudless,
Not if you were given back to me.
In your eyes the old love might not linger,
In your heart the old trust might not stir:
Time, that changes all men, O my darling,
May have made you other than you were!
So I go alone to face the future,
Only hoping we may meet at last;
For my trust is all in what is over,
And my faith is given to the past.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
There is no subject before the public to-day more depressing in all its aspects, or better calculated to excite a contemptuous disbelief in the philanthropic tendencies of the nineteenth century, than that of woman-labor. No one who has read "The Children of Gibeon" or "Prisoners of Poverty" will be likely to rise from the perusal with a feeling of exhilaration, or find therein the slightest encouragement for optimistic views of the future as it looms before the feminine portion of the working-world. And yet the old adage, "the devil is not so black as he is painted," never had greater applicability than to this very matter. We cry out on the selfishness of the age, the sluggishness of Christianity, the inadequacy of all the proposed methods of relief, and stand bewildered, if not confounded, at the depth and extent of the evils which we do not know how to extirpate. To add to our confusion, we eliminate the spirit of enthusiasm and of hope from the discussion, and, thus shorn of our strength, we sit blindly grinding, like Samson at the mills of Gaza. The writer—a worker who has had ample opportunity for observation, and who has experienced in person much of the suffering so bitterly and so pathetically set forth by recent literature—has been "moved," in Quaker parlance, to record one last hitherto unregarded and, apparently, unnoted. That fact was elicited in the course of constant business relations with the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of American working-
