Well, I will stop; but they can't: they must pay so much every month for that miserable shell they live in, or be turned into the street. The meal and flour that some kind person sends goes off for them just as it does for others, and they must get more or starve; and coal is now scarce and high priced."
"O aunt, I'm quite convinced, I'm sure; don't run me down and annihilate me with all these terrible realities. What shall I do to play good fairy to these poor old women?"
"If you will give me full power, Eleanor, I will put up a basket to be sent to them that will give them something to remember all winter."
"O, certainly I will. Let me see if I can't think of something myself."
"Well, Eleanor, suppose, then, some fifty or sixty years hence, if you were old, and your father, and mother, and aunts, and uncles, now so thick around you, lay cold and silent in so many graves--you have somehow got away off to a strange city, where you were never known--you live in a miserable garret, where snow blows at night through the cracks, and the fire is very apt to go out in the old cracked stove--you sit crouching over the dying embers the evening before Christmas--nobody to speak to you, nobody to care for you, except another poor old soul who lies moaning in the bed. Now, what would you like to have sent you?"
"O aunt, what a dismal picture!"
"And yet, Ella, all poor, forsaken old women are made of young girls, who expected it in their youth as little as you do, perhaps."
"Say no more, aunt. I'll buy--let me see--a comfortable warm shawl for each of these poor women; and I'll send them--let me see--O, some tea--nothing goes down with old women like tea; and I'll make John wheel some coal over to them; and, aunt, it would not be a very bad thought to send them a new stove. I remember, the other day, when mamma was pricing stoves, I saw some such nice ones for two or three dollars."