But, in the times of which I speak, the service on the plantation for the sick slave (which, an ungracious criticism might have suggested, since a slave was ordinarily a valuable piece of property, had something of a sordid element in it) was matched in communities and under conditions where no such suspicion was possible. No one who knows anything of life in our smaller communities at the beginning of the century can be ignorant of what I mean. There was no village or smallest aggregation of families that had not its Abigail, its "Aunt Hannah," its "Uncle Ben," who, when there was sickness or want or sorrow in a neighbor's house, was always on hand to sympathize and to succor. I do not forget that it is said that, even under our greatly changed conditions, in modern cities this is still true of the very poor and of their kindness and mutual help to one another; and I thank God that I have abundant reason, from personal observation, to know that it is. But, happily, neither great cities nor small are largely made up of the very poor, and the considerations that I am aiming to present to those who will follow me through these pages are not concerned with these. What I am now aiming to get before my readers is that there was a time, and that it was not so very long ago, when that vast institutional charity which exists among us to-day, and which I believe to be in so many aspects of it so grave a menace to our highest welfare, did not exist, because it had no need to exist. The ordinary American community, East or West, had, as distinguishing it, however small its numbers and narrow its means, two characteristics which our modern systems of institutional charity are widely conspiring to extinguish and destroy. One of these was that resolute endurance of straitness and poverty of which there is so fine and true a portraiture in Miss Wilkins's remarkable story Jerome. I venture to say that the charm of that rare book, to a great many of the most intelligent and appreciative of its readers, lay in the fact that they could match it, or something like it, in their own experience; that they had known silent and proud women, and brave and proud boys, to whom, whatever the hard pinch of want that they knew, to accept a dole was like accepting a blow, and who covered their poverty alike from the eye of inquisitive stranger or kin with a robe of secrecy that was at once impenetrable and all-concealing. Life to them was a battle, and they could lose it, as heroes have lost it on the tented field, without a murmur; but to sue for bread to some other, even if that other were of the same blood, would have smitten them as with the stain of personal dishonor.