One superiority, at least, she confesses England to have over America. The
dreadful "interviewer" who has haunted her steps for the last eight years
of her life with a dogged pertinacity which would take no denial, was here
nowhere to be seen. He exists we know, but she failed to recognize the
same _genus_ in the quite harmless-looking gentleman, who, occasionally on
the stage after a performance, or in her drawing-room, engaged her in
conversation, when leading questions were skillfully disguised; and, then,
much to her astonishment, afterward produced a picture of her in print
with materials she was quite unconscious of having furnished. She failed,
she admits now, to see the conventional "note-book," so symbolical of the
calling at home, and thus her fears and suspicions were disarmed.

One instance of Mary Anderson's kind and womanly sympathy to some of the
poorest of London's waifs and strays should not be unrecorded here. It was
represented to her at Christmas time that funds were needed for a dinner
to a number of poor boys in Seven Dials. She willingly found them, and a
good old-fashioned English dinner was given, at her expense, in the Board
School Room to some three hundred hungry little fellows, who crowded
through the snow of the wintry New Year's Day to its hospitable roof.
Though she is not of our faith, Mary Anderson was true to the precepts of
that Christian Charity which, at such seasons, knows no distinction of
creed; and of all the kind acts which she has done quietly and
unostentatiously since she came among us, this is one which commends her
perhaps most of all to our affection and regard.




CHAPTER VIII.