been a fifty-thousand-dollar hospital, with an endowment of fifty thousand more to make it self-supporting, has a tendency to ruin other charities quite as worthy, because its maintenance pumps dry the pockets of those who have to give.  It will require a drastic course of training, I fear, to open the eyes of the public to the fact that even generosity can be overdone, and I must disclaim any desire to superintend the process of securing their awakening, for it is an ungrateful task to criticise even a mistakenly generous person; and man being by nature prone to thoughtless judgments, the critic of a philanthropist who spends a million of dollars to provide tortoise-shell combs for bald beggars would shortly find himself in hot water.  Therefore let us discuss not the causes, but some of the results of the system which has placed upon suburban shoulders such seemingly hopeless philanthropic burdens.  At Dumfries Corners the book sales of Mr. Peters, one of the vestrymen, were one of these results.

There were two of these sales.  The first, like all book sales for charity, consisted largely of the vending of ice-cream and cake.  The second was different; but I shall not deal with that until I have described the first.

This had been given at Mr. Peters’s house, with the cheerful consent of Mrs. Peters.  The object was to raise seventy-five dollars, the sum needed to repair the roof of Mr. Peters’s church.  In ordinary times the congregation could have advanced the seventy-five dollars necessary to keep the rain from trickling through the roof and leaking in a steady stream upon the pew of Mrs. Bumpkin, a lady too useful in knitting sweaters for the heathen in South Africa to be ignored.  But in that year of grace, 1897, there had been so many demands made upon everybody, from the Saint William’s Hospital for Trolley Victims, from the Mistletoe Inn, a club for workingmen which was in its initial stages and most worthily appealed to the public purse, and for the University Extension Society, whose ten-cent lectures were attended by the swellest people in Dumfries Corners and their daughters—­and so on—­that the collections of Saint George’s had necessarily fallen off to such an extent that plumbers’ bills were almost as much of a burden to the rector as the needs of missionaries in Borneo for dress-suits and golf-clubs.  In this emergency, Mr. Peters, whose account at his bank had been overdrawn by his check which had paid for painting the Sunday-school room pink in order that the young religious idea might be taught to shoot under more roseate circumstances than the blue walls would permit, and so could not well offer to have the roof repaired at his own expense, suggested a book sale.

“We can get a lot of books on sale from publishers,” he said, “and I haven’t any doubt that Mrs. Peters will be glad to have the affair at our house.  We can surely raise seventy-five dollars in this way.  Besides, it will draw the ladies in the congregation together.”