ime he is as pleased with a
good collection as if it were for his own use; and if some rich person
contributes a sovereign for the sick and poor, it is to him as it would
be to you, my daughter, if your hand was crossed with gold by some noble
gentleman who had been crossed in love.

"I explain this, my dear, that you may understand how it was that I had
planned to pay back the clergy people's ten pounds in church, which
would be as good as paying it into their hands, with the advantage of
secrecy for myself. On the Saturday I drives into the little market in a
donkey-cart with greens, and on Sunday morning I goes to church in a
very respectable disguisement, and the sexton puts me in a pew with
some women of infirm mind in workhouse dresses, for which, my daughter,
I had much to do to restrain myself from knocking him down. But I does;
and I behaves myself through the service with the utmost care, following
the movements of the genteeler portion of the company, those in the pew
with me having no manners at all; one of them standing most of the time
and giggling over the pew-back, and another sitting in the corner and
weeping into her lap.

"But with the exception of getting up and sitting down, and holding a
book open as near to the middle as I could guess, I pays little
attention, my daughter, for all my thoughts is taken up with waiting for
the collection to begin, and with trying to keep my eyes from the
clergywoman's face, which I can see quite clearly, though she is at some
distance from me."

"Did she look very wild, Mother, as if she felt beside herself?"

"She looked very bad, my daughter, and grey, which was not with age. I
tells you that I tried not to look at her; and by and by the collection
begins.

"It seems hours to me, my daughter, whilst the money is chinking and the
clergyman is speaking, and the ten pieces of gold is getting so hot in
my hands, I fancies they burns me, and still not one of the
collecting-men comes near our pew.

"At last, one by one, they begins to go past me and go up to the
clergyman who is waiting for them at the upper end, and then I perceives
that they regards us as too poor to pay our way like the rest, and that
the plates will never be put into our pew at all. So when the last but
one is going past me, I puts out my hand to beckon him, and the woman
that is standing by me bursts out laughing, and the other cries worse
than ever, and the collecting-man says, 'Hush! hush!