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When this distressing news reached her, she was occupying a hired chamber in another town, the mortgage on their house having expired, and the holder of the claim being unwilling that she should remain in it. Left as no young wife could wish to be, without the presence of her husband, suffering from poverty, loneliness, and neglect, Julia hardly knew which way to turn for relief, and in her heart of hearts bitterly lamented the days of her youthful heedlessness and folly.

Divine Providence takes far better care of his creatures than they do of themselves, and especially sends relief to those who earnestly cry to Him, and also strive to help themselves. So it proved in Julia's case. As she anxiously, day after day, inquired, "What shall I do? where shall I go? who will befriend me?" she remembered her maternal great uncle, Isaac Warren, the in- firm old neighbor to citizen John Tucker, whom we have before mentioned. She immediately went and cast herself on his protection. The good old man and his wife received her with the utmost kindness, and forthwith made her more comfortable than she had been for several weeks past.

We have said a young mother lay dying at the Warrens. This was Julia. She had been with them eight weeks, and her third child was now about a week old.

Every thing earthly -- all considerations of family, home, affection other than the affection that now centred in the little infant at her side, led Julia to desire to leave the world. For the sake only of the babe, she wished to live, and in that point of view, it seemed to her cruel to die, although she was fully aware that she could not recover. When left alone, she would often address her little, unconscious one in words that came warm and fresh from her thoughts -- "My dear little child! My sweet baby boy! Mother must leave you. Who will love you and take care of you? How I cling to you, sweet one! I fear to leave you in this cold world alone -- poor, poor child! But God will take care of my baby. God will feed him. Heaven will guard the darling little lamb. Yes -- oh, yes, may its mercy bless the innocent." Then she would mourn over her husband -- "I loved him; I gave him my whole heart; I pitied him; I mourned for him; I mourn him still. Poor forsaken one. Ruined? How can it be? Forsaken -- sick -- dying -- in a strange land too! But I have never forgotten him -- never. I have loved on as at first, and shall do so to the end. My own -- my all. My husband -- precious in the recollections of the past. I come to you. I forget you not -- no, never, nor shall I in death forget, or forsake you."

Cherishing these sentiments so honorable to herself, and comforting to her heart, the young and lovely one passed gently away, and the aged couple closed her eyes in their last sleep.

Not long after Mrs. Sherman died. "Annie Sue" came into the house weeping for the death of her own babe. And as the Warrens were perplexed what to do with their little charge, and by little and little came at last to realize what a providential arrangement this was for at least the present rearing of the child, and "Annie Sue" herself joyfully acquiesced in the plan, they gave her the orphan babe and she became his nursing mother!

Before Julia died she called for a pen, and while she yet had strength enough for the effort, she wrote as follows: "Call my baby James, after his father. This is the dying request of his mother; and let him know he had a true and kind father, and a mother who loved him to the last. (Signed) Crampton, January 15, 183-, Julia Carlile Sherman." She then asked for a little, delicate silver-mounted tobacco-box, which had been his father's, and bore his name on the lid, and into it, after carefully folding, she pressed the paper.

This was the mother of JIMS!

As for "Annie Sue," she nursed the child, and called it her own. But in every Sense he was a pauper, by his parental title, by his foster mother's claim, and his own necessity. "Annie Sue" at length would hear to no compromise by which she should resign the child. And as the old people were rather ashamed of having given it up in the first place, they kept the matter secret -- only the old couple kept possession of the box and its precious testimony.

Although "Annie Sue" had now been dead some five or six years, leaving Jims on the town as a pauper, old Mr. Warren survived and still kept the document that affirmed the actual parentage and legitimacy of our young hero.

In his possession there were also some other papers and waitings, incidental fragments of the family history.

CHAPTER XVIII.
CRAPE for Aunt Dorothy. Crape is a great institution. It belongs to the Genus Sackcloth, and so hails from Job, and other far off Personages. Government goes for crape. An Administration that wouldn't vote "thirty days" crape would be put down; Jobbers and Consumers would rouse the nation and Old Monopoly get awfully crushed between them. You never see a Dignitary, a Dogmatist, a Delectable, a sensible Bachelor, or a sincere Widower who marries the second and third time only for the sake of his children, despising crape!