And thus her time is spent. When she is not organising a refuge she is setting on its legs a dinner fund, when she has exhausted the patience of her friends on behalf of her particular tame widow, she can always begin afresh with a poverty-stricken refugee, and if the delights of the ordinary subscription-card should ever pall, she can fly for relaxation to the seductive method of the snowball, which conceals under a cloak of geometrical progression and accuracy, the most comprehensive uncertainty in its results. One painful incident in her career must be chronicled. Fired by her example, but without her knowledge, a friend of hers from whom she is accustomed to solicit subscriptions, steps down to do battle on her own account in the charitable arena. And thus, when next the Poor Lady Bountiful makes an appeal in this quarter on behalf of a Siberian Count, whom she declares to be quite a gentleman in his own country, she is met by the declaration, that further relief is impossible, as her friend has a Bulgarian of her own to attend to. Thus there is an end of friendship, and both parties scatter dreadful insinuations as to the necessity for an audit of accounts. Eventually it happens that a rich and distant relation of her husband dies, and leaves him unexpectedly an income of several thousands a-year. Having thus lost all her poverty, she retires from the fitful fever of charitable life to the serene enjoyment of a substantial income, and awaits, with a fortitude that no collector is suffered to disturb, the approach of a non-subscribing and peaceful old age. * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. _Hard Luck_, by ARTHUR A BECKETT, begins a trifle slow, but works up to an exciting climax, of which the secret is so profoundly kept, up till the very last moment, that not the most experienced in sensational plots would discover it. Capitally managed. It is one of the Arrowsmith Series, and a genuinely artistic shilling shocker. _A Black Business._ By HAWLEY SMART. Uncommonly smart of him bringing it out just at this time, when the talk everywhere is about the Slave Trade, the struggle for Colonial life, STANLEY, and the Very Darkest Africa. There's Black Business enough about. Smart chap HAWLEY.