wound me so undeservedly, I flung the wretched coin, with which my
thoughtless parent sought to buy his ease and comfort from me,
violently upon the floor.

Through my blinding tears I watched it roll quietly over the carpet
and stop suddenly against the prostrate figure of a doll that lay at a
little distance from where I sat. This incident changed the whole
tenor of my rebellious thought; in the earlier part of the day I had
dressed this doll in very fine clothes, intending to carry it to the
house of a poor neighbor, who lived in the rear of my father's
premises, and whose baby-girl was confined, through some hopeless
deformity, to the narrow limits of an invalid chair.

Something prevented me from carrying out this generous design at the
time, but the discarded coin unexpectedly revived my abandoned
project, and turned my thoughts into a pleasant channel. I rose up and
dried my eyes, and putting on my little sun-bonnet, gathered up the
fashionable wax lady and the piece of despised money, and stealing
down a quiet back-stairway, I went out on my mission of charity.

When I reached the home of my little invalid friend, I peered
noiselessly in at the window, as was my custom, lest, perhaps, I
should awaken her from one of her quiet slumbers, but this time she
was not sleeping; she sat upright in her chair with pillows at her
back, and her thin hair fell from her bowed head over the worn and
dog-eared pages of her mother's prayer-book. It was her only other
companion, besides her mother and me, and through many long, lonely
hours she was wont to turn the leaves backward and forward, dwelling
with the instinctive reverence of unsullied childhood, upon the homely
and inartistic representations it contained of the beautiful Drama of