liar
decoration, but he took care not to go home until it was lost.

With the more decent inhabitants of the district he was soon a great
favorite; but he was feared and abhorred by the others. Felix belonged
to the new school of philanthropic economy, which discerns, and protests
against thoughtless almsgiving; and above all, against doles to street
beggars. He would have made giving equally illegal with begging. But he
soon began to despair of effecting a reformation in this direction; for
even Phebe could not always refrain from finding a penny for some poor
little shivering urchin, dogging her steps on a winter's day.

"You do not stop to think how cruel you are," Felix would say
indignantly; "if it was not for women giving to them, these poor little
wretches would never be sent out, with their naked feet on the frozen
pavement, and scarcely rags enough to hide their bodies, blue with cold.
If you could only step inside the gin-shops as I do, you would see a
drunken sinner of a father or a mother drinking down the pence you drop
into the children's hands. Your thoughtless kindness is as cruel as
their vice."

But still, with all that fresh ardor and energy which is sneered at in
the familiar proverb, "A new broom sweeps clean," Felix swept away at
the misery, and the ignorance, and the vice of his degraded district. He
was not going to spare himself; it should be no sham fight with him. The
place was his first battlefield; and it had a strong attraction for him.

So through the pleasant months of spring, which for the last four years
had been spent at Oxford, and into the hot weeks of summer, Felix was
indefatigably at work, giving himself no rest and no recreation, besides
writing long and frequent letters to Mrs. Pascal, or rather to Alice.
For would not Alice always read those letters, every word of them? would
she not even often be the first to open them? it being the pleasant
custom of the Pascal household for most letters to be in common,
excepting such as were actually marked "private." And Mrs. Pascal's
answer might have been dictated by Alice herself, so exactly did they
express her mind. They did not as yet stand on the footing of betrothed
lovers; but neither of them doubted but that they soon would do so.

It was not without a sharp pang, however, that Felix learned that the
Pascals were going to Switzerland for the summer. He had an intense
longing to visit the land, of which his grandmother had s