"Yes, ma'am, a deal better; but where am
I, and who is it with me?"

"You are in your own pretty cottage, and
Miss Laura is with you. You expected me
home, did you not?"

"Oh thank God; who sent you, dear Miss
Laura? How is—but may-be I had best not
ask just while I am so weak. Is the dear boy
well?"

"Yes, quite well; and Bella is much better.
I have sent her for a few days to L——, with
Mrs. Maythorn; the sea air will do her
good."

"Oh, thank you—thank you—dear young
lady for the thought. I seem so bound up in
that dear child, that nothing could comfort
me for her loss. How good and kind you are,
Miss—you do all so well and so quietly!"

"Yes, Fanny, dear," said Thomas, coming
from behind the curtain and stooping to kiss
his wife. "Miss Laura has saved you and
Bella, and me too, for I could'nt have lived
if you had died; and has found me work;
and all without making one great present, or
doing anything one could speak about. I'll
tell you what it is, wife, dear, Miss Isabel
does all for the best, but it is just as she feels
at the moment. Now Miss Laura—if I may
be so bold to speak, Miss—Miss Laura does
not give to please her own feelings, but to do
good. I can't say it well, but do you say it
for me, Miss; I want Fanny to know the
right words, to teach the little ones by-and-
bye. You know what I wish to say, Miss
Laura."

"Yes Thomas," said Laura, blushing, "but
I do not say you are right. You mean, I
think, that my sister acts from impulse, and I
from principle. Is that it?"

"I suppose that's it, Miss," said Thomas,
considering, and apparently not quite satisfied.

"You have no harder meaning, I am sure,"
said Laura, quietly, "because I love my sister
very much."

"Certainly not, Miss," returned Thomas.
"But, myself, if I may take the liberty of
gratefully saying so, I prefer to be acted to on
principle, and think it a good deal better than
impulse."

CHIPS.

TORTURE IN THE WAY OF BUSINESS.

The mention in a recent number of the
extreme cruelty practised on calves, has
drawn forth the following statement from a
correspondent,—a clergyman in Bedfordshire:—

"A member of my family was witness to
the following act of barbarity, viz., that of
plucking the feathers from a duck while yet
alive. Upon being expostulated with, the
man replied that it was a common practice,
—'we half break their necks, then pluck
them while they are warm, and then finish
them off,' This act of cruelty was witnessed
in Brighton Market. If the above will at all
assist you in exposing the atrocities which are
practised on the brute creation, I shall be
thankful. The public generally (save a few
gross sensualists) have only, it is to be hoped,
to be told what is practised on many articles
of consumption, to make them protest against
such wanton insults on God's workmanship."

The only means of accounting for such
irrational cruelty, is the supposition that the
offending poulterers imagine ducks to be
endowed by nature with no more feeling than
feather-beds.

The savage indifference with which
unappreciable agonies are systematically inflicted
upon sentient creatures, strikes us occasionally
with wonder. The police reports have lately
revealed a case which nothing but the best
testimony could render credible. A
correspondent of the Times Newspaper was some
weeks since walking in the Walworth Road,
when he saw several persons assembled round
the shop of a butcher; half a dozen men were
endeavouring to force two bullocks into a
slaughter-house. The butcher's journeyman
struck one of the animals on the legs with
a broom handle, which had a sharp pointed
spike. The door of the slaughter-house was
very narrow; the man got a rope and fixed
it tightly round the horns of the bullock, and
some of them then pulled this from the inside
of the slaughter-house; the others were
beating the brute behind and pushing it on.
He saw one of the butchers twisting the
animal's tail till he doubled it up, and the
bones were dislocated—at least, he was led to
think so by the right angle formed by the two
portions of the tail. The man's hands were
covered with blood which flowed from the
tail; and he rubbed the dislocated parts
together, which caused the poor animal to moan
most piteously. Several of the bystanders
expressed their disgust.

The fellows were brought before the
Lambeth magistrate by the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but
unfortunately the principal witness mistook one
of the offenders for another person—his
brother. The complaint, therefore, from that
legal informality, broke down.

The defendants appeared to treat the mere
pulling a bullock through a passage too small
for its comfortable admission, with ropes tied
to its horns; the pushing it with goads from
behind; the agonising twisting of its tail; as
matters of the most perfect indifference. In
his exultation at getting off, one of them
facetiously promised the magistrate, in answer
to an expostulation as to the narrowness of
the passage, "that, to oblige his Worship, he
would make the place big enough to admit a
full-grown elephant, or a hippopotamus."

We have in former articles shown that
this sort of brutality is of every-day occurrence,
and perpetrated in the regular way of
business. Use begets insensibility. We have
no doubt that the poulterer and butchers
concerned in the atrocities we have detailed,