signed himself cheerfully to
the care of his friends, who carried him off.

Another quiet applicant was a lady, whose natural-born gentility
poverty might obscure but could not conceal. Years of want and
struggling deprivation had dimmed her charms; but they had neither
bowed nor bent her stately form, nor quenched the inherent virtue of
self-respect, nor deprived her of the correct and appropriate diction,
and the winning and courteous expression which once graced a
drawing-room. She was introduced to us by the beadle as Lady W----;
and although draped in very humble and well-worn apparel, she looked
what she was--a gentlewoman in every sense of the word; though beyond
an empty title, she possessed hardly anything in the world. She
answered our inquiries with a natural courtesy, which at least some of
us felt to be a condescension. 'Gentlemen,' she said, 'it is true, as
your attendant states, that I am a lady. In my youth, I married a
titled man. I make no boast of that--it was, indeed, my misfortune. I
was brought up and educated to occupy a station inferior to few: I
filled that station for many years; it is not for me to say how
appropriately; and though calamity has overtaken me now, and I have
been familiar with necessity for so long a time, yet I feel that I am
a lady still. I may be reproached with poverty, and that I can bear;
but I trust I shall never be justly reproached with having fallen to
the level of my circumstances. I am grateful to you for the assistance
you so kindly render me; and I can express that sentiment, and feel it
deeply, too, without humiliation, because the aid you supply is as
voluntary on your part as its acceptance is necessary on mine.' When
our foreman had instinctively wrapped the donation awarded to her in a
quarter sheet of letter-paper, and presented her with it, she bent
with a dignified obeisance, and silently withdrew.

A third applicant, worthy of a passing notice, was a lady of a very
different stamp. Who or what she had been in former years, I could not
ascertain, but she appeared before us in the character of a
middle-aged mince-pie monomaniac, and jam-tart amateur. The poor
harmless creature was clad in the veriest shreds of dusky feminine
attire, which barely shielded her limbs from the inclemency of the
weather. She had a notion that she, too, was a lady, and that, being a
lady, she was bound to live by the consumption of pastry, and nothing
else. We were admonished by