The 11th of November (St. Martin's Day) is the one generally chosen for the distribution of winter clothing to the poor of the parish, and this in commemoration of the mediaeval legend of the holy Bishop Martin, who gave half his ample cloak to a shivering leper who begged of him in the street. Next night, says the legend, he saw in a dream Christ himself clothed in that cloak, and remembered the promise that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these, ye have done it unto Me." The writer has often assisted at such distribution of warm clothing, both made and unmade. In every county squire's house there is a bi-or tri-weekly distribution of soup to the village poor, and in most two or three sets of fine bed-linen and soft baby-clothes, to be lent out on occasions requiring greater comforts than the poor and too often thriftless women of agricultural villages can afford. Private charity is all-reaching: the "hall" is the dispensary and the general ark of refuge for all county ills, moral, physical and pecuniary, and its help is never thought degrading, like that of the "parish." Most families pay a doctor and a nurse by the year to attend the poor free of expense, and an order from the doctor for jellies, soup or wine, as well as for the ordinary sorts of medicine, is always sure of being filled from the ample stores of the "housekeeper's room." If the city poor were half as well provided for as are the agricultural poor by their "lords of the manor," there would be far less destitution. Some affect to sneer at a system which savors of what they call "feudalism," and which, they wisely suggest, encourages pauperism, but warm-hearted and charitable people will probably disagree with these searchers after new methods, and will be glad to find in the ready sympathy of English landowners for their poor neighbors a ray of the old-fashioned unquestioning charity which distinguished biblical times. B.M. * * * * * LANDORIANA.