pers?"

"Of course," producing a memorandum book and pencil. "Let me take down
name and amount. We publish these names. And now let me give you a
little history of our asylum, and the providential way in which it was
started."

CHAPTER VII.

A GENTLEMAN WITH GOLD SLEEVE-BUTTONS.

At an interesting point of the narration, and at the moment when, with
much curiosity, indeed, urgency, the narrator was being particularly
questioned upon that point, he was, as it happened, altogether diverted
both from it and his story, by just then catching sight of a gentleman
who had been standing in sight from the beginning, but, until now, as it
seemed, without being observed by him.

"Pardon me," said he, rising, "but yonder is one who I know will
contribute, and largely. Don't take it amiss if I quit you."

"Go: duty before all things," was the conscientious reply.

The stranger was a man of more than winsome aspect. There he stood apart
and in repose, and yet, by his mere look, lured the man in gray from his
story, much as, by its graciousness of bearing, some full-leaved elm,
alone in a meadow, lures the noon sickleman to throw down his sheaves,
and come and apply for the alms of its shade.

But, considering that goodness is no such rare thing among men--the
world familiarly know the noun; a common one in every language--it was
curious that what so signalized the stranger, and made him look like a
kind of foreigner, among the crowd (as to some it make him appear more
or less unreal in this portraiture), was but the expression of so
prevalent a quality. Such goodness seemed his, allied with such fortune,
that, so far as his own personal experience could have gone, scarcely
could he have known ill, physical or moral; and as for knowing or
suspecting the latter in any serious degree (supposing such degree of it
to be), by observation or philosophy; for that, probably, his nature, by
its opposition, imperfectly qualified, or from it wholly exempted. For
the rest, he might have been five and fifty, perhaps sixty, but tall,
rosy, between plump and portly, with a primy, palmy air, and for the
time and place, not to hint of his years, dressed with a strangely
festive finish and elegance. The inner-side of his coat-skirts was of
white satin, which might have looked especially inappropriate, had it
not seemed less a bit of mere tailoring than something of an emblem, as
it were; an involuntary emblem, let us say, that what see