duty."

"And wouldn't you?"

"What a question! Go through fire? No, I should bawl for the engine."

"It's plain, then, that he will answer better than you for the place."

"No doubt. I shouldn't answer at all. I tell you I never talk with these
creatures. I can't. If an old woman stops me, with her dried-apple face
and whining voice, I give her a sixpence and tell her to hush up and
go about her business. I fling coppers to the boys with slit breeches
before they ask me, for I know they will tell me of mothers sick with
consumption. Their devilish tears are contagious; and I can't cry; it
chokes me. So I buy apples and oranges from the imploring-looking
girls; it's the easiest way of getting rid of them. The little change
don't amount to much in a day, and I save my nerves and my digestion at
a cheap rate."

Mr. Holworthy smiled at Easelmann's notion of his own hard-heartedness,
and said, hesitatingly,--

"I am afraid that some professedly charitable persons don't do so much."

"Of course they don't. I don't mean that I do anything. It's pure
selfishness on my part, as I told you. But you may feel pretty sure,
that, if a man's name is always in the papers, as 'our estimable
fellow-citizen, President This, Director That, and Treasurer T'other,'
he 'does not give indiscriminate alms':--I believe that is the phrase.
Perhaps he won't rob, like my friend Sandford; but his 'disinterested
labors' are an economical substitute for substantial charity, and his
desire for a place in the public eye is the mainspring of all his
actions."

"Most of the distress in the community is relieved by organized effort;
individual charities, however well meant, would be entirely inadequate.
Besides, you should not be severe upon all because one prominent person
has proved unworthy."

"Sandford is a type of the class. If there is anybody I hate worse than
a sick beggar, it is a man who makes a trade of philanthropy."

"And yet you are consenting to your friend's earning a living by
teaching a ragged school."

"True, one may stop at any place in a storm, just for shelter."

"And you can console yourself further with the assurance that your
friend won't make enough in this place to induce him to take up the
'trade,' as you call it."

"I hope not. Starve him judiciously. If he should come out, after a
year or so, with a white neckcloth, spectacles, and a sanctified face,
soliciting aid for his school, in Pecksniffian tones, I shou