that she herself may appear bountiful, and, as a rule,
her efforts in this direction will be crowned with a success that would
be phenomenal, if it were not so common. The history of her earlier
years is easily written. Whilst still a child, she begins a collecting
career, by being entrusted, on behalf of a church building fund, with a
card divided into "bricks," each brick being valued at the price of
half-a-crown. Her triumphs in inducing her relations and their friends
to become purchasers of these minute and valueless squares of cardboard
are great, and the consideration she acquires on all hands as a
precocious charitable agent is very acceptable even to her childish
mind.

Her profession having thus been determined, she devotes herself with an
unflagging ardour to the task of diminishing the available assets of
those with whom she may be brought in contact. Her parents, who are not
overburdened with riches, look on at first with amusement, and
afterwards with the dismay which any excess of zeal always arouses in
the British breast. Their protests, however, fall upon deaf ears, and
they adopt an attitude of severe neutrality, in the hope that years and
a husband may bring wisdom to their daughter.

This does not save them from being made involuntary sharers in her
charitable iniquities. Her father wakes one morning to find himself
famous to the amount of one pound ten, contributed under the name of "A
Cruel Parent," to the Amalgamated Society for the Reform of Rag-pickers,
and his wife at the same time is made indignant by the discovery that
she figures for twelve-and-sixpence, as "A Mother who ought to be
Proud," in the balance-sheet of the United Charwomen's Home Reading
Association. Further inquiry reveals the fact that the former sum
resulted from the sale by the daughter to an advertising Old Clothes'
Merchant of two of her father's suits, which, although they had seen
service, he had not yet resolved to discard; and the result is the
dismissal of the family butler, who had connived in the transaction. The
twelve-and-sixpence had been formed gradually by the accumulation of
stray coppers and postage-stamps, which her mother was accustomed to
leave about on her writing-table, without the least intention that they
should be devoted to charity. The parents expostulate in vain. The
consciousness that she has diverted to objects, which she believes to be
admirable, money that might have been unworthily spent, stee