sed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had
sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people--to
anybody Who Happened Along the Strand--to a Foundling Hospital.

* * * * *

The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it
because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human
nature. He thought he ought to encourage me.

I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion.

I think it would have been better to have had just a few of those
pennies in the Strand say seven or eight missing.

On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would
have been missing--I hope.

And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand.

There are two ways to get relief from this story.

First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would
have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies
between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear
little foundlings got them--the letter in the _Times_ said. They were
presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand.

Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a
sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the _Times_
and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the
pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in
the _Times_ to come out at the other.

Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off.

But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon.

If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that
memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened
in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it.
It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with
enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try
stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like.

The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling
ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it
again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash
drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United
States.

At all events the last thing that I would be willing to believe is that
either America or England would be capable