"This was not extravagance, but good use of the money, all around:--for the poor little milliner whose shop had been destroyed and business ruined, whose children were then eating the bread of charity; and for the customless dressmaker, who was also a grievous sufferer by the flood, with younger sisters to support. We gave her the first work she had had for weeks, and her gratitude was good to see. "As for merchants, who were all on the verge of failure, but making heroic efforts to keep afloat--Heaven knows we did them injury enough every day of our stay in Galveston, to be thankful for the privilege of occasionally becoming their patrons. Not only had they suffered immense losses by the storm, their stocks being practically ruined and customers gone--but who would buy, so long as the Red Cross had food and clothes to give away, without money and without price? Though ours is a noble and necessary work, it is never to the advantage of the local merchants, as a little reflection will show. "Another case was that of a young woman, who, with an aged relative, was keeping a hotel in a near-by village, when the floods lifted their house from its foundations and ruined everything in it. Its four walls stood, however, and furnished shelter for all the houseless neighbors, who flocked in, naked and hungry, and with whom the generous girl divided her last garment and bit of food. Death also entered the family, twice within a few weeks--the last time leaving a sister's four half-grown children for this young woman to maintain. Take them she must, because they had nowhere else to go. Finding her in terrible straits, without even clothes to wear to her sister's funeral, were we not justified in buying the heroic young woman a decent suit of black, besides sending her a box of food supplies? Why were we there, if not to exercise judgment in the matter of relief? If merely to distribute second-hand articles, without discrimination, we might have saved ourselves much peril and hardship by remaining at home, and sending the boxes down to take care of themselves.