A Philanthropist | Page 5

a chance visitor,
entering unannounced, might have been treated to the delicious
spectacle of a charming middle-aged gentleman in white flannels
reading, near a birch fire and a priceless pewter tea-service, to a
handsome middle-aged woman in black silk, the following pregnant
lines:
"There was an old person of Bow, Whom nobody happened to know,
So they gave him some soap, And said coldly, 'We hope You will go
back directly to Bow!'
And the illustration is worthy of the text," he added enthusiastically, as
he passed the volume to her.
She had no sense of humor, but she had a sense of justice, and it
occurred to her that after all an agreement was an agreement. If to listen
to insinuating inanities was the price of his attention, she would pay it.
She had borne more than this in order to do good.
So the readings continued, a source of unmixed delight to her lodger
and a great spiritual discipline to herself.

As the days grew milder their intimacy, profiting by the winter
seclusion, led him to accompany her on her various errands. She was at
first unwilling to accept his escort--it too clearly resembled a tacit
consent to his idleness. But his quiet persistence, together with his
evident cynicism as to the results of these professional tours,
accomplished, as usual, his end; and the wondering village might
observe on hot June mornings its benefactress, languidly accompanied
by a slender man in white flannels, balancing a large white green-lined
umbrella, picking his way daintily along the dusty paths, with a
covered basket dangling from one hand and a gray-green volume
distending one white pocket.
There was material, too, for the interested observer in the picture of
Miss Gould distributing reading matter, fruit, and lectures on household
economy in the cottages of the mill-hands, while her lodger pitched
pennies with the delighted children outside. It was on one of these
occasions that Miss Gould took the opportunity to address Mr. Thomas
Waters, late of the paper and cardboard manufacturing force, on the
wickedness and folly of his present course of action. Mr. Waters had
left his position on the strength of his wife's financial success. Mrs.
Waters was a laundress, and the summer boarders, together with Mr.
Welles, who alone went far toward establishing the fortunes of the
family, had combined to place the head of the house in his present
condition of elegant leisure. "I wonder at you, Tom Waters, after all the
interest we've taken in you \ Are you not horribly ashamed to depend
on your wife in this lazy way?" Miss Gould demanded of the once
member of the Reformed Drunkards' League. "How many times have I
explained to you that nothing--absolutely nothing--is so disgraceful as a
man who will not work? What were you placed in the world for? How
do you justify your existence?"
"How," replied her unabashed audience, with a wave of his pipe toward
the front yard, where Mr. Welles was amiably superintending a
wrestling match, "does he justify hisn?"
Had Miss Gould been less consistent and less in earnest, there were
many replies open to her. As it was, she colored violently, bit her lip,

made an inaudible remark, and with a bitter glance at the author of her
confusion, now cheering on to the conflict the scrambling Waters
children, she called their mother to account for their presence in the
yard at this time on a school-day, and for the first time in her life left
the house without exacting a solemn promise of amendment from the
head of the family.
"I guess I fixed her that time!" Mr. Waters remarked triumphantly, as
he summoned his second pair of twins from the yard and demanded of
them if the gentleman had given them nickels or dimes.
The gentleman in question became uncomfortably conscious, in the
course of their walk home, of an atmosphere not wholly novel, that lost
no strength in this case from its studied repression. That afternoon, as
they sat in the shade of the big elm, he in his flexible wicker chair, she
in a straight-backed, high-seated legacy from her grandfather, the
whirlwind that Mr. Waters had so lightly sown fell to the reaping of a
victim too amiable and unsuspecting not to escape the sentence of any
but so stern a judge as the handsome and inflexible representative of
the moral order now before him.
Miss Gould was looking her best in a crisp lavender dimity, upon
whose frills Mrs. Waters had bestowed the grateful exercise of her
highest art. Her sleek, dark coils of hair, from which no one stray lock
escaped, framed her fresh cheeks most admirably; her strong white
hands appeared and disappeared with an absolute regularity through the
dark-green wool out of which she