t he was only a good man, whatever else by severe
censors may be objected to him, it is still to be hoped that his
goodness will not at least be considered criminal in him. At all events,
no man, not even a righteous man, would think it quite right to commit
this gentleman to prison for the crime, extraordinary as he might deem
it; more especially, as, until everything could be known, there would be
some chance that the gentleman might after all be quite as innocent of
it as he himself.

It was pleasant to mark the good man's reception of the salute of the
righteous man, that is, the man in gray; his inferior, apparently, not
more in the social scale than in stature. Like the benign elm again, the
good man seemed to wave the canopy of his goodness over that suitor, not
in conceited condescension, but with that even amenity of true majesty,
which can be kind to any one without stooping to it.

To the plea in behalf of the Seminole widows and orphans, the gentleman,
after a question or two duly answered, responded by producing an ample
pocket-book in the good old capacious style, of fine green French
morocco and workmanship, bound with silk of the same color, not to omit
bills crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworms' grime upon
them. Lucre those bills might be, but as yet having been kept unspotted
from the world, not of the filthy sort. Placing now three of those
virgin bills in the applicant's hands, he hoped that the smallness of
the contribution would be pardoned; to tell the truth, and this at last
accounted for his toilet, he was bound but a short run down the river,
to attend, in a festive grove, the afternoon wedding of his niece: so
did not carry much money with him.

The other was about expressing his thanks when the gentleman in his
pleasant way checked him: the gratitude was on the other side. To him,
he said, charity was in one sense not an effort, but a luxury; against
too great indulgence in which his steward, a humorist, had sometimes
admonished him.

In some general talk which followed, relative to organized modes of
doing good, the gentleman expressed his regrets that so many benevolent
societies as there were, here and there isolated in the land, should not
act in concert by coming together, in the way that already in each
society the individuals composing it had done, which would result, he
thought, in like advantages upon a larger scale. Indeed, such a
confederation might, perhaps, b