t. Are
you going home with me?"

It was a sensible conjecture; for why else should I follow on?

"I am going to see you safely at the door, and to help you over all
the crossings."

"There's only one more, sir, and here it is; we live down there at No.
3, on the third floor back."

The child looked kindly, and as she sweetly bade me "good by, sir," I
thrust my hand in my pocket and drew from it all the change it
contained, which was a bright fifty cent piece, and placed it in her
little palm. 'Gusta Taggard gave me her heartfelt thanks, and was soon
out of my sight.

An hour before, I had started from my home an invalid. I had long
deliberated whether an exposure to a chilly east wind would not injure
rather than improve me. I was melancholy, too; my only daughter was
about to be married--there was confusion all over the house--the
event was to be celebrated in fashionable style. Ellen's dress had
cost what would have been a fortune to this poor seamstress, and I
moralized. But I had forgotten myself; the cough which had troubled me
was no longer oppressive. I breathed quite freely, and yet I had
walked more briskly than I had done for months, without so much
fatigue as slow motion caused, so that when I returned, my wife
rallied me upon looking ten years younger than when I left her in the
morning; and when I told her the specific lay in my walk with a little
prattler, and the satisfaction of having left her happier than I found
her, she took the occasion to press the purchase of a diamond brooch
for Ellen, affirming if the gift of half a dollar made me so much
happier, and that, too, to a little errand street girl, what would
fifty times that amount confer upon one's only daughter, upon the eve
before her marriage?

I gave the diamond brooch--I paid the most extravagant bills to
upholster's, dry goods establishments, confectioners and musicians,
with which to enliven the great occasion, and yet I found more real
satisfaction in providing for the real wants of little 'Gusta Taggard
and her mother than in all the splendid outlay of the wedding
ceremony; and it was not that it cost less which made the
satisfaction, but it was that all extravagant outlays, in the very
nature of things, are unsatisfactory, while ministering to the
necessities of the truly needy and industrious confers its own reward.

I had seen the glittering spangled dress--but it was made ready by
some poor, emaciated sufferer, who toiled on i