ate need of food,
clothes, and medicines, but that she could not do what she wished
because she had already spent all the money allowed her by her father
for such purposes, and dared not go to him for more, as she had once
before offended him by doing this, and feared if she repeated her fault
he would carry out the threat he had then made of stopping her allowance
altogether. But the family was a deserving one and she could not see any
member of it starve, so she came to me, of whose goodness she was
assured, convinced I would understand her perplexity and excuse her--and
so forth and so forth, in language quite childlike and entreating,
which, if it did not satisfy my ideas of propriety, at least touched my
heart, and made any action which I could take in the matter extremely
difficult.

"To refuse her request would be at once to mortify and aggrieve her; to
accede to it and give her the fifty dollars she asked--a sum, by the
way, I could not well spare--would be to encourage an action, easily
pardoned once, but which if repeated would lead to unpleasant
complications, to say the least. The third course of informing her
father of what she needed I did not even consider, for I knew him well
enough to be sure that nothing but pain to her would be the result. I
therefore compromised the affair by enclosing the money in a letter in
which I told her that I comprehended her difficulty and sent with
pleasure the amount she needed, but that as a friend I must add that
while in the present instance she had run no risk of being misunderstood
or unkindly censured, that such a request made to another man and under
other circumstances might provoke a surprise capable of leading to the
most unpleasant consequences, and advised her if she ever again found
herself in such a strait to appeal directly to her father, or else to
deny herself a charity which she was in no position to bestow.

"This letter I undertook to deliver myself, for one of the curious
points of her communication had been the entreaty that I would not delay
the help she needed by trusting the money to any hand but my own, but
would bring it to a certain hotel down town, and place it at the
beginning of the book of Isaiah in the large Bible I would find lying on
a side table in the small parlor off the main one. She would seek it
there before the morning was over, and so, without the intervention of a
third party, acquire the means she desired for helping a poor and