Whether, however, the judge of the world in general errs most in expecting me to pay the necessary twopences to his hosts, or the world in general itself, in expecting me to pay necessary twopences to its old servants when it has no more need of them, may be perhaps questionable. Here is a paragraph cut out of an application for an hospital vote, which I received the other day:— Mr. A., aged seventy-one, has been a subscriber to the Pension Fund forty-five years, the Almshouse Fund eighteen years, and the Orphan Fund four years. He is now, in consequence of his advanced age, and the infirmities attendant on a dislocated shoulder, asthma, and failing sight, incapable of earning sufficient for a subsistence for himself and wife, who is afflicted with chronic rheumatic gout. He was apprenticed to Mr. B., and has worked for Mr. C. D. forty years, and his earnings at present are very small. Next, here is a piece of a letter disclosing another curious form of modern distress, in which the masters and mistresses become dependent for timely aid on their servants. This is at least as old, however, as Miss Edgeworth’s time; I think the custom is referred to at the toilette of Miss Georgiana Falconer in ‘Patronage.’ “Every day makes me bitterly believe more and more what you say about the wickedness of working by fire and steam, and the harm and insidious sapping of true life that comes from large mills and all that is connected with them. One of my servants told my sister to-day (with an apology) that her mother had told her in her letter to ask me if I would sell her my children’s old clothes, etc.—that indeed many ladies did—her mother had often bought things. Oh! it made me feel horrible. We try to buy strong clothes, and mend them to the last, and then sometimes give them away; but selling clothes to poor people seems to me dreadful. I never thought ladies and gentlemen would sell their clothes even to shops—till we came to live here, and happened to know of its being done. It surely must be wrong and bad, or I should not feel something in me speaking so strongly against it, as mean and unholy.” A piece of country gossip on bees and birds, with a humiliating passage about my own Coniston country, may refresh us a little after dwelling on these serious topics:—