"And how do you get the half-crown?" questioned the Squire. "And your dinner and breakfast--how do you get that?" Mrs. Mapping passed her trembling fingers across her brow before she answered-- "I'm sorry to have to tell of these things, sir. I'm sorry you have found me out in my poverty. When I think of the old days at home, the happy and plentiful days when poor mother was living, and what a different life mine might have been but for the dreadful marriage I made, I--I can hardly bear up against it. I'm sure I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for giving way." For the tears were streaming down her thin cheeks. The Squire set up a cough on his own account; I went to the window and looked down at some grimy back-gardens. "When I am a little stronger, and able to do a full day's work again, I shall get on, sir, but I've been ill lately through going out in the wet and catching cold," she said, mastering the tears. "Miss Kester is very good in supplying me with as much as I can do." "A grand 'getting on,'" cried the Squire. "You'd be all the better for some fire in that grate." "I might be worse off than I am," she answered meekly. "If it is but little that I have, I am thankful for it." The Squire talked a while longer; then he put a sovereign into her hand, and came away with a gloomy look. "She wants a bit of regular help," said he. "A few shillings paid to her weekly while she gets up her strength might set her going again. I wonder if we could find any one to undertake it?" "You would not leave it with herself in a lump, sir?" "Why, no, I think not; she may have back debts, you see, Johnny, and be tempted to pay them with it; if so, practically it would be no good to her. Wish Pitt lived here still! Wonder if that Miss Kester might be trusted to---- There's a cab, lad! Hail it." The next morning, when we were at breakfast at the hotel--which was not the Tavistock this time--the Squire burst into a state of excitement over his newspaper. "Goodness me, Johnny! here's the very thing." I wondered what had taken him, and what he meant; and for some time did not clearly understand. The Squire's eyes had fallen upon an advertisement, and also a leading article, treating of some great philanthropic movement that had recently set itself up in London. Reading the articles, I gathered that it had for its object the distribution of alms on an extensive scale and the comprehensive relieving of the distressed. Some benevolent gentlemen (so far as we could understand the newspaper) had formed themselves into a band for taking the general welfare of the needy into their hands, and devoted their lives to looking after their poverty-stricken brothers and sisters. A sort of universal, benevolent, set-the-world-to-rights invention. The Squire was in raptures. "If we had but a few more such good men in the world, Johnny! I'll go down at once and shake their hands. If I lived in London, I'd join them."