please send twenty dollars, amount loaned, by return mail. If not
convenient, five dollars will do as instalment." Pshaw! (Throws
letter aside, and takes up another.) "Dear Sir: I invite your
attention to enclosed circular for a proposed Home for Dissipated
and Anonymous Gold-Miners. Your well-known reputation for
liberality, and your late valuable experience in the reformation of
your son, will naturally enlist your broadest sympathies. We
enclose a draft for five thousand dollars, for your signature." We
shall see! Another: "Dear Sir: the Society for the Formation of
Bible Classes in the Upper Stanislaus acknowledge your recent
munificent gift of five hundred dollars to the cause. Last Sabbath
Brother Hawkins of Poker Flat related with touching effect the
story of your prodigal to an assemblage of over two hundred miners.
Owing to unusual expenses, we regret to be compelled to draw upon
you for five hundred dollars more." So! (Putting down letter.)
If we were given to pride and vainglory, we might well be puffed up
with the fame of our works and the contagion of our example: yet I
fear that, with the worldly-minded, this praise of charity to
others is only the prayerful expectation of some personal
application to the praiser. (Rings hand-bell.)

Enter JACKSON.

(To JACKSON.) File these letters (handing letters) with the
others. There is no answer. Has young Mr. Alexander come in yet?

Jackson. He only left here an hour ago. It was steamer day
yesterday: he was up all night, sir.

Old Morton (aside). True. And the night before he travelled all