Beadle's Dime Novels No. 3: Myra, the Child of Adoption — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

6 MYRA, the misty draperies, and half smothered in delicate lace, lay the beautiful infant; and a little way off, upon the larger couch re- posed another being in the first bud and bloom of womanly beauty, not asleep, but with her large eyes wandering tenderly toward the infant, and from that to a bouquet of orange-blossoms and’ moss-roses that, feebly clasped in her delicate fingers, was yet falling apart and dropping its blossoms over the counterpane. An air of gentle languor lay upon this young creature, and there was something more than that affectionate tenderness with which a mother regards her young child, in the look that she, from time to time, cast upon the slumbering infant—a shade of sadness, that but for her feeble state, might have ta- ken the strength of passionate regret, seemed ready to break from her eyes in a flood of tears, whenever they dwelt longer than usual upon the babe. But when her grief was ready to * break forth, she would allow her eyes to droop toward the flowers that seemed to have some pleasant association con- nected with their fragrance, and a sweet smile—not the less sweet that there was sadness in it—would part her lips while a faint sigh floated through them. All at once the infant began to nestle in its crib, and open- ing its large brown eyes, turned them upon the recumbent fe- male. As if her tears lay so near the surface as to require only this motion to set them flowing, the young mother, as she encountered the infantile glance, shuddered faintly, and drops gathered in her eyes, and fell one by one over her but pale cheeks. “I must not look at it, I must not learn to loye it so,” she murmured, turning her head away, and shading her tearful eyes with one hand. “Ah! why should I, a mother so young, and with a husband like him, always find every feeling, every Ps impulse shackled as it springs from heart? Why was there no one to shield my youth wihe blight, that I feel, too surely, will cling around me to ? The infant began to cry, and thére came into the rooma colored woman, tall and with that superb luxuriance of form | that so frequently characterizes the dusky-hued woman of the = South. She approached the crib and took the child in her arms, hushing it with a sort of cajoling attempt at tenderness, that-seemed to annoy the young mother not a little. % — ae 7 é pi 5A Comichooksicom