"It is the very subject I intend to broach to Mr.——, to-morrow morning," replied the minister, with an enthusiastic glow suffusing his expressive face. "Please place your own name for that sum somewhere on the list," said the gentleman, taking a note for 20_l._ out of his pocket-book and giving it to the minister. The good preacher was trying to stifle his grateful tears, in order to thank the sceptic,—but the latter bowed and strode away; and the good preacher, as he walked towards his own house in deep reflective silence, had many thoughts of the true interpretation of such words as "infidel" and "Christian" that would have startled his audience, if he had uttered them before it on the following Sunday. In spite of an agonised bodily system, the minister was early abroad the next morning, and his glorious brow beamed with pleasure, when the maid-servant announced that the rich manufacturer's gig was at the door, and the conversation was near that he hoped would result in the effective commencement of a subscription to relieve the misery, and hunger, and cold, and disease, under which the depressed stockingers and their families were groaning that severe winter. Yet the philanthropist, with all his guilelessness, knew the man he had to deal with, and proceeded in a somewhat circumlocutory way to his object. In the end, he enforced the claims of man as a brother, the admirableness and divinity of charity, and the indefeasible rights of the working man as a substantial agent in the creation of wealth, with so much of the potentiality of his transcendent eloquence, that the manufacturer, in spite of the resistance his heart's avarice made to the godlike theme, assented to the proposal that he should begin the public subscription. But how heart-stricken with grief and shame did the golden-tongued pleader feel when, on producing the little book he had prepared for collecting the names of subscribers, the rich manufacturer hesitated as soon as he had written his name, bit the end of his cedar pencil, and then hastily put five pounds at the end of his name! The minister did not thank him, for his soul was too noble to permit his tongue to utter one word which his heart would not accompany: but he had, again, some peculiar thoughts about the true interpretation of the words "infidel" and "Christian."