she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than why, the poor live. Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the husband's income from the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better. Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for until it was a positive relief to me when, after more years of starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.