hat the House had known
her for six years, and had once been very good to her when her little
girl was buried. The resident more than suspected that her visitor knew
the school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talk
upon that subject was evidently considered very rude. The visitor wished
to get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the House
should not help her. The alderman was out of town, so she could not go
to him. After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to get
another point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at a
refusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt,
why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident,
on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she would
have been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should lift
weights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles.

Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higher
ethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, but
it is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, in
which the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipient
is broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:--

A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness and
pathos of forlorn old age. She is responsible for the well-being of
perhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate
and almost filial relation. Some of them learn to take her benefactions
quite as if they came from their own relatives, grumbling at all she
does, and scolding her with a family freedom. One of these poor old
women was injured in a fire years ago. She has but the fragment of a
hand left, and is grievously crippled in her feet. Through years of pain
she had become addicted to opium, and when she first came under the
visitor's care, was only held from the poorhouse by the awful thought
that she would there perish without her drug. Five years of tender care
have done wonders for her. She lives in two neat little rooms, where
with her thumb and two fingers she makes innumerable quilts, which she
sells and gives away with the greatest delight. Her opium is regulated
to a set amount taken each day, and she has been drawn away from much
drinking. She is a voracious reader, and has her head full of strange
tales made up from books and her own imagination. At one time it s