Constitutional Whig

A FRAGMENT.

It was one of the coldest nights of the season. The wind blew with remorseless violence:—Aunt Eunice was herself ill, and begged that I would step up and see how the poor woman was. I entered the habitation It was a poor shelter. The pale moon-beams played on the floor thro' the chinks, and the wind whistled through the broken windows. On the bed, pale and emaciated with a fever, lay the poor woman. In a cradle by the side of the bed, wrapped in a single rug, slept an infant, and in the corner, over a small fire sat a little boy about five years old. There was no other being in the house; no friend to sooth her distress; no nurse to moisten her burning lips, with a drop of water. Poverty has few allurements; sickness has none; and prudery and uncharitableness readily availed themselves of the frailties of the poor sufferer, to excuse their neglect.

I stepped out to procure a loaf of bread for the children; I was not long gone, and on returning to the door. the sound of footsteps on the floor told me somebody was within. O, it was a pleasant sight! A young female friend, whose genius is not unknown to her literary acquaintance— whose virtues and amiable disposition, combined with a peculiar agreeableness of manners, render her beloved as extensively as she is known, had preferred to the gay scenes of mirth or the charms of a novel, a lone and unostentatious visit to the house of poverty and the bed of sickness! Like an angel of mercy, she was administering to the comfort of the poor woman and her infant!

I have seen the assemblies of the great. I have seen women glowing with beauty—arrayed in the richest attractions of dress, whose charms were heightened by the "pride, and pomp, and circumstance" of "elegant conviviality." A lovely woman, in such a scene, irresistibly commands our admiration. But alone—at the bed of poverty and sickness—she appears more than human; I would not be impious, but she seems almost divine