I was much troubled in my mind as to how I could most help the widow of Burt's Buildings, and I knew that I could best assist her by helping her to help herself. One of her great troubles was that she had to leave her little ones so long, and a strange sense of pain had shot through me as she spoke of finding them huddled together as they had cried themselves to sleep. What could I do then? The thought came: A sewing machine! that which had been her enemy to be now her friend; and the next morning I was in one of our busiest streets in front of a large establishment within whose plate-glass doors I saw a pretty lady-like young woman, busy winding thread upon one of some dozen of the ingenious little pieces of mechanism, and upon stating my wants she led me up to a bluff, sharp-looking, grey man whose face seemed to soften as she spoke before returning to her task. "Sewing machine ma'am, eh?" he said, eyeing me very sharply. "Own use?" "No," I said, "I want it for a poor woman to enable her to earn her living." "Instalments, ma'am," he said sharply. "I beg your pardon." "Want to pay for it by instalments?" he said. "Oh! no, I will pay for it at once, and you can deliver it to her." "Oh," he said smiling, "that's twenty per cent, discount." I looked at him wonderingly, for I did not know what twenty per cent discount might be. "I always take twenty per cent discount off these machines," he said, and I left pleasurably impressed by his ways and those of the young girl he introduced to me as his daughter, and that little new machine was the first of several in which I had Mr Smith's kind co-operation and advice in what were doubtful cases. The result was a warm intimacy, in the course of which he told me his little history and that of his daughter--stepdaughter he called her-- Ruth. "Mine's a curious trade to have taken to," he said, "and I had plenty of up-hill work, but it has grown to be profitable. Things were at a low ebb with me when I took it up, while now--" There, I won't boast, only say that I'm thankful for it. Poverty comes in at the door, and love flies out of the window, so they say; but that's all nonsense, or else your poor people would be always miserable, while according to my experience your poor man is often more lighthearted than the man with thousands. I was at my wits' end for something to do, and sat nibbling my nails one day, and grumbling horribly. "Don't go on like that, Tom," says my wife; "things might be worse." "How?" I said. "Why, we might have Luke at home, and he is doing well." Luke's our boy, you know, and we had got him into a merchant's office, where he seemed likely to stay; but I was in a grumbling fit then, and there was a clickety-click noise going on in the next room which fidgeted me terribly. "Things can't be worse," I said angrily; and I was going to prove myself in the wrong by making my wife cry, when there was a knock at the door.