The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the street. Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies in the box. The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the _Times_ saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was missing. He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people--to anybody Who Happened Along the Strand--to a Foundling Hospital. * * * * * The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human nature. He thought he ought to encourage me. I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion. I think it would have been better to have had just a few of those pennies in the Strand say seven or eight missing. On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would have been missing--I hope. And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand. There are two ways to get relief from this story. First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear little foundlings got them--the letter in the _Times_ said. They were presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand. Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the _Times_ and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in the _Times_ to come out at the other. Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off. But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon. If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it. It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like. The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United States.