the storm ceased and the moon rose. It had been arranged that I should remain till the picture was finished, and a painting-room was assigned me accordingly, situated in a sort of wing which Mr Jackson's predecessor had built for a ball-room; but the Jack sons being quiet people, who gave no balls, had divided it into three, by partitions of Indian matting. The central division was my painting-room, rather better lighted than any artist would desire by two windows looking into the garden; to the right was my bedroom, and on the left a spare apartment, considered the coolest in the house, and, therefore, intended for the much-regarded twins. Partitions of Indian matting, though cheap and movable, have two great faults namely, that they allow sounds to pass readily, and are apt to shew minute crevices when they get dry. I was standing close by the one which divided mine from the children's room, putting my colour-box in order by the last light of day, and the Indian night gives short warning, when, through the heavy rain, which was coming down in water-spouts, there came a sort of half hiss, half whisper, the queerest sound that ever struck my ear. I was born in France; and there was a crevice within reach of my eye. What need of further apology? There was Zelle, alone, and all wet, as if she had just crept in through the window, which stood open, taking out of her little grass-basket something like a large green ball, which she carefully tucked in under the bolster of the bed. Which of her duties the trusted maid had come to perform so stealthily, I could not guess; but she stepped out of the window, and closed it behind her so swiftly and silently, that I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw her glide away into the verandah.

The rain continued, and the travellers did not come. Mrs Jackson hoped they had stopped for that day with some of the many friends they had on the road, and the family retired to rest at the usual hour. But the dry season makes crevices in roofs as well as in partitions: the rain had found one just above my bed, and poured in such a torrent, that before it was discovered, the chamber was perfectly uninhabitable. My good hostess, however, requested that I would occupy the children's room for the night, and I had installed myself there with candle and writing-case, in order to write letters which were justly due to sundry correspondents, for I was not inclined to sleep. The whole house was silent. It was near midnight; and I was half-way in a letter to Armandine-we were friends then-when a slight rustle made me look up, and there stood Zelle as erect and composed as if she had come for one of the oft-mentioned tracts.

'Saib,' said she, there's a cobra in your bed: I smelled it as I passed your door, for my family were serpent-charmers. What will you give me if I take it away?'

6

How did it come there?' said I, pretending to write on, though my pen was making cobras on the paper, for the green ball I had seen taken out of the basket recurred to my memory, and I knew the said serpent to be one of the most deadly of its kind. The Portuguese settlers call it the capella or hooded-snake, by which name it is known in Europe; but it had obviously not been placed under the bolster for me; and as Zelle replied quite innocently

'I don't know, saib,' my resolution was taken, though it certainly was not the best policy.

'I'll give you half a rupee,' said I; and with a quiet gesture of assent to the bargain, Zelle approached the bed, turned up the bolster, and, without haste or fear, lifted out the deadly thing, coiled up exactly as she had laid it in; and, may I be forgiven, but I half wished it might bite her. Nothing of the kind happened to Mrs Jackson's maid: she laid the cobra carefully into her muslin apron, opened the window, and stepped out into the garden. The rain had

ceased, and the moon was shining. I saw her go down the walk straight to the outer gate. She opened it too, and I followed her; but long before I could reach the gate, it was locked behind her, and the girl was out of sight. I returned to my writing-table, certain that she would come back for the half-rupee; and in less than half an hour, back Zelle came by the very way she went, and calmly closed the window, saying:

Now, Saib, the cobra's at home with his friends, and has promised never to come near your bed again.' 'Very well, Zelle,' said I, getting between her and the door, I have promised you a half-rupee, and I will give it to you, but I saw you put that cobra in the bed this evening. If you tell me why you did so, I will not mention it to any of the family till you are two days safe out of the house; and if you do not, I will rouse them all, and tell them this instant.'

Zelle looked to see whether there was any way of escape, but I had my eye on the window; then her face took the fixed, stony look of the Eastern, who knows his destiny is not propitious.

'Saib,' said she, 'I put it there to kill the judge's children. My mother sent it to me, to be revenged on this family for all the evil they have done to ours. Listen, and I will tell you the truth, for you do not come from England. My father was a Brahmin and a Zemindar; he inherited his land by adoption into the family of our ancient neighbour Guzroo, and the Saib Lester, who then gave law in Agra, took it from him, saying he had no right, and it belonged to the Company. It had always been the custom to rear but one daughter in our house, and in due time that daughter was wedded, with a marriage-feast becoming a family of high caste; but the Saib Jackson found out this custom, and so frightened our people with his law that all the girls grew up. When my father's soul departed, my mother determined to become a suttee, according to the custom of her ancestors, that the family might have honour in this world and in paradise; but the preaching Saib, who is also one of the Jacksons, talked so much, that fear came upon her when the pile was ready, and she could not perform the ceremony. Now, see what the doings of these hogs, who eat everything, have brought upon my people. By the loss of his land, my father could not make the accustomed offerings; he therefore lost his standing in the temples and in the favour of the gods. By the loss of their inheritance, my brothers were brought down to trades beneath their castes. There was no means to make marriagefeasts for five daughters; all my sisters are therefore married to low-caste men, and I am a Pariah, drinking out of common vessels, and going abroad with an unveiled face. My mother was so despised by her neighbours and at the holy places, that she would not live, but threw herself into the Jumna, an offering to the goddess Durga, who will not refuse even the polluted. By her favour, she has reached the transmigration of the serpent, and sent the cobra to me that we might be avenged on this family, who worship nothing but rupees, and think to buy heaven and earth with them. Now, Saib, give me my wages, for I have taken away the cobra and told you the truth.'

'I did not venture to reason with the maid of whom the missionaries had hopes. She took her halfrupee, and glided away to her own room. My own sleep was not sound that night, and in the morning Zelle was nowhere to be found. Neither mistress nor servants could give any account of her, but that she had performed her accustomed duties, and retired to rest as usual; that her room was all in order, and her trinkets and best clothes gone with her. I resolved to keep my promise, and let the two days elapse; but in the interim, I could not resist telling the story to a countryman and confidential friend of mine, who had been for fifteen years a silk-merchant in Agra.

"Take my advice,' said he, and say nothing about it. I know something of the English; they'll wonder why you did not immediately tell her master -what business you had to look through chinks -in short, they won't believe you; and if the girl's disappearance produces no worse effect on your reputation, you will be set down as a Jesuit in disguise; and I understand the Jacksons are stiff Protestants; yet it might be as well to warn the family by an anonymous letter.'

I took his advice, and the letter was sent; but not being in their confidence, the Jacksons never mentioned it to me.

The lady deeply regretted the absence of her handy maid. Mr Jackson made diligent inquiries after her, but all to no purpose; but some time after, the part of her doings which most puzzled me was cleared up. Why, do you think, did she come to remove the cobra? Not for the half-rupee alone; but her brother, the merchant at Agra, happened to be the very man from whom I was in the habit of purchasing trifles for myself and presents for my friends at home, and the bill I owed him just then saved my life.

upon womanhood, as great a bane to all true modesty, as the most unchaste Messalina who ever disgraced her sex.

I beg to warn these foul grubbers in the dark places of the earth-not for purposes of cleansing, but merely because it amuses them-that they will not find anything entertaining in this article. They will only find one woman's indignant protest against a tone of thought and conversation which, as their consciences will tell them, many other women think it no shame to pursue when among their own sex; and which, did the other sex know it, would injure as much as any open vice, by making men disbelieve in virtue-disbelieve in us. As to its vileness in the sight of Heaven truly many a well-reputed British matron may be considered as much a 'lost' woman as any poor, seduced creature whose child is born in a workhouse, or strangled at a ditch-side.

It is to this class, who have fallen out of the ranks of honest women, without sinking to a lower depth still, that I chiefly refer: because with them, those for whom those papers are meant-namely, the ordinary middle ranks of unmarried females-are more likely to have to do. That other class-awful in its

of sin, whom philanthropists and political economists are for ever discussing, and can come to no conclusion about-this I leave to the wise and generous of both sexes who devote their lives to the subject; to the examination and amelioration of a fact so terrible that, were it not a fact, one would hardly be justified in alluding to it here. Wretched ones! whom even to think of turns any woman's heart cold, with shame

LOST WOMEN.

I ENTER on this subject with a hesitation strong enough to have prevented my entering on it at all, did I not believe that to write for or concerning women, and avoid entirely that deplorable phase of womanhood which, in country cottages as in city streets, in books, newspapers, and daily talk, meets us so continually that no young girl can long be kept ignorant of it, would be to give a one-sided and garbled view of life, which, however pretty and pleasant, would be false, and being false, useless. We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it: we have no right, not even the most sensitive of us women, mercifully constituted with less temptation to evil than men, to treat as impure what God has not made impure, or to shrink with sanctimonious ultra-delicacy from the barest mention of things which, though happy circumstances of temperament or education have shielded us from ever being touched or harmed thereby, we must know to exist. If we do not know it, our ignorance-quite a different thing from innocence-is at once both helpless and dangerous: narrows our judgment, exposes us to a thousand painful mistakes, and greatly limits our power of usefulness in the world.

On the other hand, a woman who is for ever paddling needlessly in the filthy puddles of human nature, just as a child delights in walking up a dirty gutter when there is a clean pavement beside it, deserves, like the child, whatever mud she gets. And there is even a worse kind of woman still, only too common among respectable matrons, talkative old maids, and even worldly fascinating young ones, who is ready to rake up every scandalous tale, and titter over every vile double entendre, who degrades the most solemn mysteries of holy Nature into vehicles for disgraceful jokes, whose mind, instead of being a decent dwelling-house, is a perfect Augean stable of uncleanness. Such a one cannot be too fiercely reprobated, too utterly despised. However intact her reputation, she is as great a slur

to whom happiness and love are things unknown; God and heaven mere words to swear with; and to whom this earth must be a daily hell:

Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa. But the others cross our path continually. No one can have taken any interest in the working-classes without being aware how frightfully common among them is what they term a misfortune'-how few young women come to the marriage-altar at all, or come there just a week or two before maternity; or having already had several children, often only half brothers and sisters, whom no ceremony has ever legalised. Whatever be the causes of this-and I merely skim over the surface of a state of things which Times and sanitary commissioners have plumbed to sickening depths-it undoubtedly exists; and no single woman who takes any thought of what is going on around her, no mistress or mother who requires constantly servants for her house, and nursemaids for her children, can or dare blind herself to the fact. It is easy for tenderly reared young ladies, who study human passions through Miss Austen or Miss Edgeworth, or the Loves of the Angels, to say: 'How shocking! Oh, it can't be true.' But it is true; and they will not live many more years without finding it to be true. Better face truth at once, in all its bareness, than be swaddled up for ever in the folds of a silken falsehood.

Another fact, stranger still to account for, is that the women who thus fall are by no means the worst of their class. I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady-by one in particular, whose experience is as large as her benevolence-that many of them are of the very best-refined, intelligent, truthful, and affectionate.

'I don't know how it is,' she would say 'whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with their own rank-such brutes or clowns as labouring men often are!-so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or whether, though this theory will shock many people, other virtues can exist and flourish, entirely distinct from, and after the loss of,

that which we are accustomed to believe the indispensable prime virtue of our sex-chastity. I cannot explain it; I can only say that it is so: that some of my most promising village-girls have been the first to come to harm; and some of the best and most faithful servants I ever had, have been girls who have fallen into shame, and who, had I not gone to the rescue, and put them on the way to do well, would infallibly have become "lost" women.'

There, perhaps, is one clue caught. Had she not 'come to the rescue.' Rescue, then, is possible; and they were capable of being rescued.

I read lately an essay, and from a pure and good woman's pen too, arguing, what licentious materialists are now-a-days unblushingly asserting, that chastity is not indispensable in our sex; that the old chivalrous boast of families-all their men were brave, and all their women virtuous'-was, to say the least, a mistake, which led people into worse ills than it remedied, by causing an extravagant terror at the loss of these good qualities, and a corresponding indifference to evil ones much more important.

While widely differing from this writer-for God forbid that our Englishwomen should ever come to regard with less horror than now the loss of personal chastity-I think it cannot be doubted that even this loss does not indicate total corruption or entail permanent degradation; that after it, and in spite of it, many estimable and womanly qualities may be found existing, not only in our picturesque Nell Gwynnes and Peg Woffingtons, but our poor everyday sinners: the servant obliged to be dismissed without a character and with a baby; the sempstress quitting starvation for elegant infamy; the illiterate village lass, who thinks it so grand to be made a lady of-so much better to be a rich man's mistress than a workingman's ill-used wife, or rather slave.

Till we allow that no one sin, not even this sin, necessarily corrupts the entire character, we shall scarcely be able to judge it with that fairness which gives hope of our remedying it, or trying to lessen in ever so minute degree, by our individual dealing with any individual case that comes in our way, the enormous aggregate of misery that it entails. This it behoves us to do, even on selfish grounds, for it touches us closer than many of us are aware-ay, in our hearths and homes-in the sons and brothers that we have to send out to struggle in a world of which we at the fireside know absolutely nothing; if we marry, in the fathers we give to our innocent children, the servants we trust their infancy to, and the influences to which we are obliged to expose them daily and hourly, unless we were to bring them up in a sort of domestic Happy Valley, which their first effort would be to get out of as fast as ever they could. And supposing we are saved from all this; that our position is one peculiarly exempt from evil; that if pollution in any form comes nigh us, we just sweep it hastily and noiselessly away from our doors, and think we are all right and safe. Alas! we forget that a refuse-heap outside her gate may breed a plague even in a queen's palace.

action and a fearlessness of consequences which are to her a greater safeguard than any external decorum. To be, and not to seem, is the amulet of her innocence. Young women, who look forward to marriage and motherhood, in all its peace and dignity, as your natural lot, have you ever thought for a moment what it must be to feel that you have lost innocence, that no power on earth can ever make you innocent any more, or give you back that jewel of glory and strength, having which, as the old superstition believed,

Even the lion will turn and flee

From a maid in the pride of her purity?

That, whether the world knows it or not, you know yourself to be-not this. The free, happy ignorance of maidenhood is gone for ever; the sacred dignity and honour of matronhood is not, and never can be attained. Surely this consciousness alone must be the most awful punishment to any woman; and from it no kindness, no sympathy, no concealment of shame, or even restoration to good repute, can entirely free her. She must bear her burden, lighter or heavier as it may be at different times, and she must bear it to the day of her death. I think this fact alone is enough to make a chaste woman's first feeling towards an unchaste that of unqualified, unmitigated pity.

This, not in the form of exaggerated sentimentalism, with which it has of late been the fashion to treat such subjects, laying all the blame upon the seducer, and exalting the seduced into a paragon of injured simplicity, whom society ought to pet, and soothe, and treat with far more interest and consideration than those who have never erred. Never, as it seems to me, was there a greater mistake than that into which some writers have fallen, in fact and fiction, but especially in fiction, through their generous overeagerness to redeem the lost. These are painted-one heroine I call to mind now-as such patterns of excellence, that we wonder, first, how they ever could have been led astray; and secondly, whether this exceeding helplessness and simplicity of theirs did not make the sin so venial, that it seems as wrong to blame them for it as to scold a child for tumbling into an open well. Consequently, their penitence becomes unnecessary and unnatural; their suffering, disproportionably unjust. You close the book inclined to arraign society, morality, and, what is worse, Providence; for all else, feeling that the question is left much as you found it; that angelic sinners such as these, if they exist at all, are such exceptions to the generality of their class, that their example is of very little practical service.

To refine away error till it is hardly error at all; to place vice under such extenuating circumstances that we cannot condemn it for sheer pity, is a fault so dangerous that charity herself ought to steel her heart against it. Far better and safer to call crime by its right name, and paint it in its true colourstreating it even as the Ragged Schools did the young vagabonds of our streets-not by persuading them and society that they were clean, respectable, ill-used, and maligned individuals; or by waiting for them to grow decent before they dealt with them at all, but by simply saying: 'Come, just as you are-ragged, and dirty, and dishonest. Only come, and we will do our best to make you what you ought to be.'

O women, women, why have you not more faith in yourselves-in that strong inner purity which alone can make a woman brave! which, if she knows herself to be clean in heart and desire, in body and soul, loving cleanness for its own sake, and not for the credit that it brings her, gives her a freedom of

Allowing the pity, which, as I said, ought to be a

hood, what is the next thing to be done? Surely there must be some light beyond that of mere compassion to guide her in her after-conduct towards them.

Where shall we find this light? In the world and its ordinary code of social morality, suited to social convenience? I fear not. The general opinion, even among good men, seems to be that this great question

Then, where are we to look?—

'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repent

ance.'

"Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more.' 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; because she

loved much.'

These words, thus quoted here, may raise a sneer on the lips of some, and shock others who are accustomed to put on religion with their Sunday clothes, and take it off on Monday, as quite too fine, maybe too useless for everyday wear. But I must write them, because I believe them. I believe there is no other light on this difficult question than that given by the New Testament. There, clear and plain, and everywhere repeated, shines the doctrine, of which until then there was no trace either in external or revealed religion, that for every crime, being repented of and forsaken, there is forgiveness with Heaven; and if with Heaven, there ought to be with men. This, without entering at all into the doctrinal question of atonement; but simply taking the basis of Christian morality, as contrasted with the natural morality of the savage, or even of the ancient Jew, which without retribution presupposes no such thing as pardon.

All who have had any experience among criminalsfrom the poor little black sheep' of the family, who is always getting into trouble, and is told continually by everybody that strive as he will, he never can be a good boy, like brother Tommy, down to the lowest, most reprobate convict, who is shipped off to Norfolk Island, because the mother-country cannot exactly hang him, and does not know what else to do with himunite in stating that, when you shut the door of hope on any human soul, you may at once give up all chance of its reformation. As well bid a man eat without food, see without light, or breathe without air, as bid him amend his ways, while, at the same time, you tell him that however he amends, he will be in just the same position-the same hopelessly degraded, unpardoned, miserable sinner.

Yet this is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: God may forgive you, but we never can !'-a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy.

That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to nature's own dealings in the visible world. There, her voice clearly says-Let all these wonderful powers of vital renewal have free play: let the foul flesh slough itself away; lop off the gangrened limb; enter into life maimed if it must be: but never, till the last moment of total dissolution, does she say: "Thou shalt not enter into life at all.'

Surely even by this means, many a woman might be| saved, if there were any one to save her; any one to say plainly: "What are you afraid of-God or man-your sin or its results?' Alas, it will be found almost invariably the latter: loss of position, of character, and consequently of the means of livelihood. Respectability shuts the door upon her; mothers will not let their young folks come into contact with her; mistresses will not take her as a servant. Nor can one wonder at this, even while believing that in many cases the fear is much more selfish than virtuous, and continued long after its cause is entirely obviated. It is one of the very few cases in which—at least at first the sufferers cannot help themselves; they must suffer: they must bear patiently for a season the effects of the immutable law which makes sin, sooner or later, its own Nemesis.

6

But not for ever-and it is worth while, pausing over this insane terror of worldly opinion, to ask: Which half of the world are you afraid of, the good or the bad?' For it may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of this odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave. I believe there are hundreds and thousands of Englishwomen who would willingly throw the shelter of their stainless repute around any poor creature who came to them and said honestly: 'I have sinned-help me that I may sin no more.' But the unfortunates will not believe this. They are like the poor Indians who think it necessary to pacify the evil principle by a greater worship than that they offer to the Good Spirit; because, they say, he is the stronger. Have we not, even in this Britain, far too many such tacit devil-worshippers?

Given a chance, the smallest chance, and a woman's redemption lies in her own hands. She cannot be too strongly impressed with this fact, or too soon. No human power could have degraded her against her will: no human power can keep her in degradation unless by her will. Granted the sin, howsoever incurred, willfully or blindly, or under circumstances of desperate temptation; capable of some palliations, or with no palliation at all-take it just as it stands in its whole enormity, and there leave it. Set it aside, at once and altogether, and begin anew. Better beg, or hunger, or die in a ditch-except that the people who die in ditches are not usually the best of even this world's children-than live a day in voluntary dishonour.

This may sound fine and romantic-far too romantic, forsooth, to be applied to any of the cases that we are likely to meet with. And yet it is the plain truth: as true of a king's mistress as of a ruined servant-maid. No help from without can rescue either, unless she wishes to save herself.

She has more power to do this than at first appears; but it must be by the prime agent, truth.

The next thing to be set before her is courage. That intolerable dread of shame, which is the last token of departing modesty, to what will it not drive some women! To what self-control and ingenuity,

being turned from an angry father's door, fabricates tale after tale, denies and denies till she can deny no longer, till all ends in a jail and a charge of childmurder; for the fashionable lady whose life is a long deceit, exposed to constant fear lest a breath should tear her flimsy reputation to rags; and for all the innumerable cases between these two poles of society, there is but one warning-No virtue ever was founded on a lie.

The truth, then, at all risks and costs-the truth