Romance in Real Life.—lt will probably be recollected by some of our readers, that in 1843, a tall, gaunt, and extremely repulsive woman was brought up at the Mansion-house, before tlie Lord Mayor-(Alderman Humphrey), charged, upon strong suspicion, of having stolen a child, which was believed to be the child of respectable parents. The facts, as they were then elicited, were briefly these :—The woman, who was of most depraved and filthy habits, •had been seen begging about the metropolis and its suburbs with a child about three years of age, which she, notwithstanding its apparent repugnance, continued, or pretended, to suckle. At length, in a state of utter exhaustion and distress, she applied for admission to the Asylum or Refuge for the Houseless Poor, where she was attended by a kind-hearted benevolent gen tleman, Dr. Bowie, the surgeon to the Institu tion,.who, during the progress of her cure, was struck with the remarkable contrast between the woman and the child, and the evident su periority of form and feature in the latter, and, so great was the dissimilarity, that he at once concluded there could be no close relation be tmeeh them, and that she had in all probability .stolen the child. Acting under this conviction, he, with Mr. Edwards, chairman of the Institu tion, obtained a warrant for the woman's appre hension, and on her recovery she was at once taken before the Lord Mayor. On her exami nation there she said her name was Mary Thompson, and that she was the widow of a Cornishsmuggler, who commanded a small craft called the " Mary Ann," in which she alleged the child was born in the month of Feb., 1840, while out at sea. She made many conflicting statements, but the one she ultimately adhered to was, that the child was hers by a man named •Holioway, and born before her marriage with Samuel Thompson. The child was taken from her, and on being.placed in a handsomely fur nished room at the Mansion-house seemed to be quite, at home with his Lordship's children, and ,on hearing a piano played appeared familiar Avith its .tones, and, approaching the instrument, spread his little fingers over the keys, and re peated "A. B. 