trangers that
lay in out-of-the-way upper rooms in hotels, who, every body knows, have
no business to get sick in such places, unless they have money enough to
pay their expenses, which they never do.

Besides this, all Mr. H.'s kinsmen and cousins, to the third, fourth,
and fortieth remove, were always writing him letters, which, among other
pleasing items, generally contained the intelligence that a few hundred
dollars were just then exceedingly necessary to save them from utter
ruin, and they knew of nobody else to whom to look for it.

And then Mr. H. was up to his throat in subscriptions to every
charitable society that ever was made or imagined; had a hand in
building all the churches within a hundred miles; occasionally gave four
or five thousand dollars to a college; offered to be one of six to raise
ten thousand dollars for some benevolent purpose, and when four of the
six backed out, quietly paid the balance himself, and said no more about
it. Another of his innocent fancies was to keep always about him any
quantity of tracts and good books, little and big, for children and
grown-up people, which he generally diffused in a kind of gentle shower
about him wherever he moved.

So great was his monomania for benevolence that it could not at all
confine itself to the streets of Boston, the circle of his relatives, or
even the United States of America. Mr. H. was fully posted up in the
affairs of India, Burmah, China, and all those odd, out-of-the-way
places, which no sensible man ever thinks of with any interest, unless
he can make some money there; and money, it is to be confessed, Mr. H.
didn't make there, though he spent an abundance. For getting up printing
presses in Ceylon for Chinese type, for boxes of clothing and what not
to be sent to the Sandwich Islands, for school books for the Greeks, and
all other nonsense of that sort, Mr. H. was without a parallel. No
wonder his rich brother merchants sometimes thought him something of a
bore, since, his heart being full of all these matters, he was rather
apt to talk about them, and sometimes to endeavor to draw them into
fellowship, to an extent that was not to be thought of.

So it came to pass often, that though Mr. H. was a thriving business
man, with some ten thousand a year, he often wore a pretty threadbare
coat, the seams whereof would be trimmed with lines of white; and he
would sometimes need several pretty plain hints on the subject of a new
hat bef