Australian Tales - Setis

love. She lavished all the affection of her nature upon it, and its innocent
prattle helped to lighten her life's dreary burden, and to cheer her
blighted heart. Mothers will understand her feelings better than I can
describe them, and I need not further dwell upon this fresh trial, which
very nearly shattered her reason. Daily she would wander to her baby's
grave to moisten the cold sod with her tears, and pour out her sorrows
unseen by any eyes but the little birds in the tall sighing oaks around the
cemetery, and by that Omniscient eye which watches the little birds, and
sees that all their wants are supplied. Poor girl! she was almost brokenhearted;
the woods often reechoed her melancholy lamentations for her
lost baby, and throughout long sleepless nights she would bemoan her
hapless misery.
About that time, Lionel Wolfe (who had settled in Victoria), paid a
visit to Wolfden for a month, and, during that period he had repeated
interviews with Mary May, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the
honest old folks with whom she lodged. Weakened as her mind was by
her various troubles, and especially by her recent bereavement, it is no
marvel that he easily obtained a mastering influence over her, and that
she became again his willing slave. One morning, shortly after Wolfe
had departed for Victoria, Mary was missing at Woollaburra, and for
sometime her whereabouts was a mystery; but at length it transpired that
she was in Melbourne, in the keeping of the unprincipled author of all
her miseries.
Further efforts were made by friends who were interested in her case,
to rescue her from her betrayer; but the means they tried were all in vain,
she seemed fast bound by a fatal spell which she would not try to break.
Drink was resorted to by her to drown reflection, and madly she sped in
the race to ruin, as thousands of other miserable girls are rushing at this
very hour. She lived but a few months with Wolfe; he soon grew tired of
his companion, who was usually either madly hilarious from the effects
of drink, or suffering from its reaction, and sorrowing in all the bitterness
of ruined hopes and down-crushed love.
Soon she was an inmate of a fashionable brothel in Melbourne. She had
been cast off by her paramour (who had gone into the far interior to
evade his creditors), and was pounced upon by one of those wicked hags
who live by the wages of poor deluded women, to whom a young and
still beautiful girl like Mary, was a prize which would for a short time
prove a new attraction to her horrible lair, and bring money to her hoard.
I dare not trust my pen to express my abhorrence of these rapacious
fiends, or those persons who encourage their iniquitous calling.
Down, down, down! whirled poor Mary, like a frail canoe in the rapids.
No mind can picture her sufferings during the succeeding five years. Her
own sad words were, “My body and mind have been racked with the
tortures of hell; and death, in its most painful form would have been a