Bowen's table I saw him drop, in quiet fashion, a bank note upon it. Mr. Bowen hastened to make change, but Mr. Bovyer shook his head and passed on. I turned to look at Mr. Bowen, and saw his face suddenly light up so cheerfully that I concluded he had received a generous donation. I led Mr. Bovyer up where the children, growing now very curious over the Christmas Tree, were with difficulty preserving the proprieties of the occasion. He looked them over carefully, as if they were some distinct species from another planet, and then turning to me, said, "Did you say these were all poor children?" "Their fathers are day laborers, and some of them are without that useful adjunct to childhood." "They look rosy and happy." "I presume they would look happy under present circumstances if their fathers were tramps. You should see the homes some of them will return to when they leave here. You would wonder at the forgetfulness of childhood." "How did you chance to think of this merry gathering?" "I am not sure it was chance. All our thoughts do not come in that way." "Are the children here who are to reap the largest benefit from this affair?" "Yes. Do you see those pale, pinched-faced girls with the pink-cotton frocks on, sitting at the end of that farthest bench, and these two boys just in front with clothes several sizes too large?" He stood silently regarding them for some time, and then said: "The world is strangely divided. It is one of the reasons that makes me doubt the existence of a beneficent All-Father." "But these may get safely into the light and fullness of Heaven." "Yes," he said, thoughtfully; "but how few of them will live up to the requirements of admittance to that perfect place?" "The rich have as many shortcomings as the poor. Sometimes I think they have even more." "You are very democratic." "Is that a serious charge against me? The one perfect Being our world has seen chose poverty, and a lot among the lowly. When the world grows older, and men get wiser, possibly they will make the same choice." "There have been solitary instances of the like along the ages--men of whom the world was not worthy--but the most of us are not such stuff as heroes are made of." I turned to him with kindling eyes: "Wouldn't you like to be one of them, Mr. Bovyer?" He gave me a look that some way I did not care to meet, and turned my eyes away quickly to a restless black-eyed little girl who was stretching eager hands to a pink-cheeked dollie. "You feel the sorrows of the poor and suffering more keenly than the most of us, I fear, Miss Selwyn," he said--more to draw me into conversation than anything else. "My sympathies are of a very easy-going, aesthetic kind. Some of your splendid music makes me cry. While I listen, I think of the hungry and broken-hearted. I seem to hear their moans in the sob and swell of the music. It was that which made Beethoven's Symphony so sad."