be melted down for the tallow trade." She always insisted that even to be unwisely imposed upon was better than to refuse one in real need; and her charities--done with such delicacy of tender helpfulness that for them charity is too cold a name--were most generous. Her countless liberal benefactions, moreover, were of the order less easy than the mere signing of checks, for into them went her personal sympathy. She helped people to help themselves in the most thoughtful and lovely ways. Now it was a typewriter given with such graceful sweetness to a literary worker whose sight was failing; now checks that saved the day for one or another; again the numerous subscriptions to worthy objects; or the countless gifts and helps to friends. A woman lecturer had been ill and unfortunate, but had several modest engagements waiting in a neighboring city if only she had ten dollars to get there. Mrs. Moulton sent her fifty that she might have a margin for comforts that she needed. To a friend in want of aid to bridge over a short time was sent a check, totally unsolicited and undreamed of, and accepted as a loan; but when the recipient had, soon afterward, a birthday, a delicate note from Mrs. Moulton made the supposed loan a birthday gift. Never did any one make such a fine art of giving as did she. Pages could be filled with these instances--the complete list, indeed, is known to the Recording Angel only. All the world of letters was talked over in those morning hours in her room. Sometimes her friends "gently wrangled," and bantered her with laughter and love. At one time she had made in a lyric a familiar allusion to larks and nightingales, and Louise Guiney, who, because she bore Mrs. Moulton's name, usually addressed her as "Godmam," took her to task for some ornithological inadvertence in the terrestrial location of her nightingale. Colonel Higginson, in a review of her poems, had quoted the stanza: Shall I lie down to sleep, and see no more The splendid affluence of earth and sky? The morning lark to the far heavens soar, The nightingale with the soft dusk draw nigh? and had ungallantly commented: "But Mrs. Moulton has lain down to sleep all her life in America, and never looked forward to seeing the morning lark on awakening. She never saw or sought the nightingale at dusk in the green lanes of her native Connecticut. Why should she revert to the habits of her colonial ancestors, and meditate on these pleasing foreign fowl as necessary stage-properties for a vision of death and immortality?" Another writer had come to the defence of the poet in this fashion: