e summer
long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots beside the sea."

"Yes, that is terrible," replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick
earnestness, while her eyes grew moist. "I have often thought of our
great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thousands of poor
creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the little children
dying for wholesome shelter. How cruelly selfish we are!"

"That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury," said Corey,
"and must make you feel almost as if you had thrown open No. 31 to the
whole North End. But I am serious about this matter. I spend my
summers in town, and I occupy my own house, so that I can speak
impartially and intelligently; and I tell you that in some of my walks
on the Hill and down on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of
the local policeman prevents my offering personal violence to those
long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If
I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at
the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the
grand piano."

"Surely, Bromfield," said his wife, "you don't consider what havoc such
people would make with the furniture of a nice house!"

"That is true," answered Corey, with meek conviction. "I never thought
of that."

"And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if you'd have so
much heart for burglary as you have now," said James Bellingham.

"It's wonderful how patient they are," said the minister. "The
spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor man sees must
be hard to bear."

Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there himself, and
knew how such a man felt. He wanted to tell them that generally a poor
man was satisfied if he could make both ends meet; that he didn't envy
any one his good luck, if he had earned it, so long as he wasn't
running under himself. But before he could get the courage to address
the whole table, Sewell added, "I suppose he don't always think of it."

"But some day he WILL think about it," said Corey. "In fact, we rather
invite him to think about it, in this country."

"My brother-in-law," said Charles Bellingham, with the pride a man
feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law, "has no end of
fellows at work under him out there at Omaha, and he says it's the
fellows from countries where they've been kept from thinking about it
that are discontented. Th