My friend who was not sure that Christ’s doctrine was the last word in regard to charity, was quite sure that you ought to have a conscience against dead-beats, whom I suggested for his consideration, especially the dead-beats who come to your house and try to work you upon one pretext or another. He said he never gave to them, and I asked what he answered them when they professed themselves in instant want; and whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared that he told them he had other use for his money. I suspect this was a proper answer to make. It had never occurred to me, but I think I will try it with the next one who comes, and see what effect it has upon him. Hitherto I have had no better way than to offer them a compromise: if they ask twenty, to propose ten; and if they ask ten, to propose five; and so on down. The first time I did this (it was with an actor, who gave me his I O U--the first and only I O U that I ever got: I suppose he was used to giving it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made ten dollars, and since then it has seemed to me that I made five dollars on several occasions; but I now think this was an illusion, and that I only saved the money: I did not actually add to my store. It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a gentleman thrown out of employment by the completion of an encyclopedia he had been at work on, and he said that he was in absolute want of food for his family, who had that morning been set out with all his household stuff on the sidewalk for default of rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and suggested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetorical account of his eviction I could probably sell it for him; that this sort of thing mostly happened to the inarticulate classes; and that he had the chance of doing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught at the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I said the sooner the better. He asked if it would not be well to get the narrative type-written, and I begged him not to wait for that; but he said that he knew a person who would typewrite it for him without charge. I could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow of enterprise. He left with me the address of a twenty-five cent lodging-house in the Bowery; for he explained that he had got money enough, by selling his furniture on the sidewalk to send his family into the country, and he was living alone and as cheaply as he could. While at work on his narrative he came for more relief, and then he vanished out of my knowledge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went down into the Bowery to his lodging-house, and found that he really lodged there,