She was still very young, not over twenty years of age; and, though squalid and dirty, and clothed with the filthy rags that vice bestows upon her degraded victims, her shrunken features retained even in death some semblance of former beauty. Her hands were small and white, and delicately formed; and seemed to have been little accustomed to hard work or out-door drudgery.
A plain gold ring encircled the third finger of the left hand. There was no money in her pockets, nothing that could give the least clue to who, or what she had been. It was painfully evident to the most casual observer, that she had died of absolute starvation.
Poor houseless wanderer! She had found at last a safe home--a soft bosom on which to pillow her aching head, and still the wild beatings of her breaking heart.
"Bless my soul! but this is a bad business, a bad business," muttered the farmer. "I wonder how it all com'd about."
The innocent child put its wasted arms around its mother's neck, and tried to awaken her with its caresses, kissing pale lips that could never kiss again, and warbling unintelligible baby language into an ear locked by eternal silence.
The man's rugged nature was touched by the pitiful sight. Tears filled his eyes, as he lifted the living child from the dead bosom to which it obstinately clung. The ragged cloak, with which maternal love had endeavoured to shield its offspring from the fury of the storm, became holy as the white robe of an angel.
"Poor lass I Thy last thought was for thy child. May the good Lord shew the same mercy to thee."
So farmer Rushmere took the little foundling to his home, and adopted her as his child; and buried the unrecognized stranger, at his own expense, in the picturesque burying-ground of the small gothic ivy-covered church that stood on the other side of the heath.
The little girl they conjectured to be between two and three years of age. She could only lisp a few broken words. All they could learn from her, in answer to their oft-repeated questions, was, that the poor dead woman was "Mammy," and that she herself was "Mammy's Dolly;" so the good man and his wife, to make sure of her being a Christian, re-baptized this stray lamb from the world's great fold, and named her Dorothy Chance. An odd and somewhat unromantic name, but very significant of the circumstances under which she was found.