, and written some little things, of which she sends
you a modest specimen, and wants your opinion whether she can gain her
living by writing. You run over the articles, and perceive at a glance
that there is no kind of hope or use in her trying to do anything at
literature; and then you ask yourself mentally, "What is to be done
with her? What can she do?"

Such was the application that had come to me this morning,--only,
instead of by note, it came, as I have said, in the person of the
applicant, a thin, delicate, consumptive-looking being, wearing that
rusty mourning which speaks sadly at once of heart bereavement and
material poverty.

My usual course is to turn such cases over to Mrs. Crowfield; and it
is to be confessed that this worthy woman spends a large portion of
her time, and wears out an extraordinary amount of shoe-leather, in
performing the duties of a self-constituted intelligence office. Talk
of giving money to the poor! what is that, compared to giving
sympathy, thought, time, taking their burdens upon you, sharing their
perplexities? They who are able to buy off every application at the
door of their heart with a five or ten dollar bill are those who free
themselves at least expense.

My wife had communicated to our friend, in the gentlest tones and in
the blandest manner, that her poor little pieces, however interesting
to her own household circle, had nothing in them wherewith to enable
her to make her way in the thronged and crowded thoroughfare of
letters,--that they had no more strength or adaptation to win bread
for her than a broken-winged butterfly to draw a plough; and it took
some resolution in the background of her tenderness to make the poor
applicant entirely certain of this. In cases like this, absolute
certainty is the very greatest, the only true kindness.

It was grievous, my wife said, to see the discouraged shade which
passed over her thin, tremulous features when this certainty forced
itself upon her. It is hard, when sinking in the waves, to see the
frail bush at which the hand clutches uprooted; hard, when alone in
the crowded thoroughfare of travel, to have one's last bank-note
declared a counterfeit. I knew I should not be able to see her face,
under the shade of this disappointment; and so, coward that I was, I
turned this trouble, where I have turned so many others, upon my
wife.

"Well, what shall we do with her?" said I.

"I really don't know," said my wife musingly