and high priced."

"O aunt, I'm quite convinced, I'm sure; don't run me down and annihilate
me with all these terrible realities. What shall I do to play good fairy
to these poor old women?"

"If you will give me full power, Eleanor, I will put up a basket to be
sent to them that will give them something to remember all winter."

"O, certainly I will. Let me see if I can't think of something myself."

"Well, Eleanor, suppose, then, some fifty or sixty years hence, _if_ you
were old, and your father, and mother, and aunts, and uncles, now so
thick around you, lay cold and silent in so many graves--you have
somehow got away off to a strange city, where you were never known--you
live in a miserable garret, where snow blows at night through the
cracks, and the fire is very apt to go out in the old cracked stove--you
sit crouching over the dying embers the evening before Christmas--nobody
to speak to you, nobody to care for you, except another poor old soul
who lies moaning in the bed. Now, what would you like to have sent you?"

"O aunt, what a dismal picture!"

"And yet, Ella, all poor, forsaken old women are made of young girls,
who expected it in their youth as little as you do, perhaps."

"Say no more, aunt. I'll buy--let me see--a comfortable warm shawl for
each of these poor women; and I'll send them--let me see--O, some
tea--nothing goes down with old women like tea; and I'll make John wheel
some coal over to them; and, aunt, it would not be a very bad thought to
send them a new stove. I remember, the other day, when mamma was pricing
stoves, I saw some such nice ones for two or three dollars."

"For a new hand, Ella, you work up the idea very well," said her aunt.

"But how much ought I to give, for any one case, to these women, say?"

"How much did you give last year for any single Christmas present?"

"Why, six or seven dollars for some; those elegant souvenirs were seven
dollars; that ring I gave Mrs. B. was twenty."

"And do you suppose Mrs. B. was any happier for it?"

"No, really, I don't think she cared much about it; but I had to give
her something, because she had sent me something the year before, and I
did not want to send a paltry present to one in her circumstances."

"Then, Ella, give the same to any poor, distressed, suffering creature
who really needs it, and see in how many forms of good such a sum will
appear. That one hard, cold, glittering ring, that now cheers nobody,
and means not