Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/848

788 her aunt in New York—a visit that had been cruelly disillusionizing from the first. In her own far-away Southern home the idea of visiting any one who lived in an apartment was enchanting. The unfamiliar word conjured up visions of romance. There was no up and down stairs in an apartment—this she had gathered from things said by her aunt. And in answer to her question, were apartments in New York all one-storied like the negro cabins, she had been told that many of them were a great deal higher than the court-house. After that the Lady Bountiful could not get to New York fast enough; she knew what they did in apartment-houses,—they flew like the fairies in her blue and gold book. The elevator was a cruel blow to an imagination attuned to flying, and "no up and down stairs" simply meant that up and down stairs belonged to some one else, and you could not play there. Her aunt was a "club-woman"; at first the Lady Bountiful had not the faintest idea what that meant, but by observing carefully she made up her mind that a "club-woman" was a lady who stayed away from home a great deal, and, when she came in, took books called "nencyclopædias" and wrote pieces out of them. Altogether, New York was a cruel disappointment, even if it was the "largest city in the Western Hemisphere," as her geography stated.

That morning a new cook, as strangely insensible to the charms of the clubbish aunt as to those of the visiting niece, had announced her intentions of leaving forthwith "if thot child set futt again in the kitchen," and the housemaid, anxious to placate the new official, for motives not wholly disinterested, had offered to take the incubus to church. And that had been the simple story of the Lady Bountiful's conversion.

Now, tied in a hard knot in the corner of the Lady Bountiful's travelling handkerchief—there had been two understudies that bore the brunt of the trip—was the ten-cent piece that her father had given her the morning she left. To the little girl it seemed an enormous sum if invested in the necessaries of life. And again she reflected sagely on the purchasing powers of the Samaritan's penny. True, it would buy only ten chocolate mice, but they were different. Grown people called things like that luxuries, and luxuries cost heaps of money. The Lady Bountiful went to the top bureau-drawer and took out the knotted handkerchief—the doom of her capital was sealed. The accommodating grocer who changed it into pennies some minutes later made no sale; he saw his unprofitable patroness depart, thought for a moment on her eagerness to change the identity of that particular coin, and wondered how she had come by it.

The dime reduced to coins of the realm of the lowest denomination—that her giving might the more closely resemble the conservatism of the Samaritan's,—she awaited, with no small degree of excitement, the coming of the poor. But the neighborhood, one of the seventies, adjacent to the Riverside Drive, did not seem to be a favorite haunt with them. She knew they could be found if there had not been that foolish edict of her aunt's that debarred her from crossing the street or going farther than the corner; but the unanimously wide berth that the needy seemed to give that thoroughfare would indicate that other of its residents had suffered from the same wilful blindness that had been hers before she heard the great charity sermon.

But she was rewarded one afternoon when an old lady sat on the curb at the corner and began to grind a perfectly mute instrument that was too far gone even to attempt a perfunctory wheeze. The Lady Bountiful was so alarmed lest this sole object of benefaction should escape that she ran to the mute, inglorious minstrel, and begged her to wait, please, till she could run home and get her a penny. The old lady was apparently as unresponsive as the box she ground, for she neither looked up nor gave any further signs of hearing when the Lady Bountiful, bending down, said, quite as close to her ear as she could persuade herself to go: "Won't you please wait till I can get you a penny? Oh, don't run away, please; I'll be back immediately."

The old lady was still grinding the box, that had not yet recovered its power of speech, when the Lady Bountiful returned, breathless, and deposited her penny in a dingy tin cup. The relief to the little