"We inclose twenty pounds, and beg you will draw upon us as far as five
thousand pounds, should you have immediate occasion.

"We are, sir,

"Your humble servants,

"JAMES AND JOHN ALLMITT."

It was some time before these children of misfortune could realize this
enormous stroke of compensation; but at last it worked its way into
their spirits, and they began to sing, to triumph, and dance upon the
king's highway.

Mrs. Triplet was the first to pause, and take better views. "Oh, James!"
she cried, "we have suffered much! we have been poor, but honest, and
the Almighty has looked upon us at last!"

Then they began to reproach themselves.

"Oh, James! I have been a peevish woman--an ill wife to you, this many
years!"

"No, no!" cried Triplet, with tears in his eyes. "It is I who have been
rough and brutal. Poverty tried us too hard; but we were not like the
rest of them--we were always faithful to the altar. And the Almighty has
seen us, though we often doubted it."

"I never doubted that, James."

So then the poor things fell on their knees upon the public road, and
thanked God. If any man had seen them, he would have said they were mad.
Yet madder things are done every day by gentlemen with faces as grave as
the parish bull's. And then they rose and formed their little plans.

Triplet was for devoting four-fifths to charity, and living like a
prince on the remainder. But Mrs. Triplet thought the poor were entitled
to no more than two-thirds, and they themselves ought to bask in a
third, to make up for what they had gone through; and then suddenly she
sighed, and burst into tears. "Lucy! Lucy!" sobbed she.

Yes, reader, God had taken little Lucy! And her mother cried to think
all this wealth and comfort had come too late for her darling child.

"Do not cry. Lucy is richer, a thousand times, than you are, with your
twenty thousand pounds."

Their good resolutions were carried out, for a wonder. Triplet lived
for years, the benefactor of all the loose fish that swim in and round
theaters; and, indeed, the unfortunate seldom appealed to him in vain.
He now predominated over the arts, instead of climbing them. In his
latter day he became an oracle, as far as the science of acting was
concerned; and, what is far more rare, he really got to know _something_
about it. This was owing to two circumstances: first, he ceased to run
blindfold in a groove behind the scenes; second, he became a frequenter
of the