Of any charitable interest, or humane occupation, to be derived from the poverty of my village neighbors, I very soon found my expectation equally vain. Our village had no _poor_--none in the deplorable English acceptation of that word; none in the too often degraded and degrading conditions it implies. People poorer than others, comparatively poor people, it undoubtedly had--hard workers, toiling for their daily bread; but none who could not get well-paid work or find sufficient bread; and the abject element of ignorant, helpless, hopeless pauperism, looking for its existence to charity, and substituting alms-taking for independent labor, was unknown there. As for "visiting" among them, as technically understood and practiced by Englishwomen among their poorer neighbors, such a civility would have struck mine as simply incomprehensible; and though their curiosity might perhaps have been gratified by making acquaintance with my various (to them) strange peculiarities, I doubt even the amusement they might have derived from them being accepted as any equivalent for what would have seemed the strangest of them all--my visit. A similar blessed exemption from the curse of pauperism existed in the New England village of Lenox, where I owned a small property, and passed part of many years. Being asked by my friends there to give a public reading, it became a question to what purpose the proceeds of the entertainment could best be applied. I suggested "the poor of the village," but, "We have no poor," was the reply, and the sum produced by the reading was added to a fund which established an excellent public library; for though Lenox had no paupers, it had numerous intelligent readers among its population.