I am afraid those magazine excerpts, though neatly “backed” for preservation, are still unadorned.

What, one wonders, will become of pickers-up of bibliophilic trifles in these days when everything committed to paper is typewritten? The relics of dead authors of the twentieth century, when those of the twenty-first come to collect them, will not be the manuscripts written in ink in a neat (or otherwise) handwriting, such as the British Museum purchases for hundreds of pounds and stores among its treasures to-day; but lacerated engrimed sheets of typescript which can make but small appeal to anyone’s emotions.

At other times various correspondents have asked of me:

If I would figure with my children in a series of articles entitled “Model Mothers,” which Mr. Harmsworth’s (Lord Northcliffe’s) enterprise was bringing out.

Would I get somebody concert engagements?

Did I approve of divorce?

Had I any theory in the bringing up of babies?

Would I permit my visiting-card to be reproduced in the illustration of an article on “The Etiquette of Card-leaving”?

Had I two or three good specimens of opals from Querétaro for a correspondent who had twice read my Mexican book?

While another enterprising gleaner sought my help in gathering his sheaf as follows:

Another enquired if I thought widows should remarry.

Lastly, among begging letters that visit the working-woman’s desk like so many buzzing flies, one covering many pages may be taken as a specimen. A youth, a French polisher by trade, wrote that he had given up his situation: taken to writing: failed and become a tramp. After many hardships, having only one penny left, he bought a postage-stamp and hoped to find a Who’s Who in his inn. He was unsuccessful, but discovered a Literary Year-Book, which he opened by chance, and his eyes fell on my name; therefore he sent me a most lengthy appeal for help, adding a promise of repayment as he had a prospect of work.

Truly strange epistles drift into the working-woman’s letter-box, and each steals a little time from her busy day.

Once an unknown person, chancing to read an article of mine on Lourdes, sent me sixteen closely written pages in French, betraying a profound anxiety on the writer’s part to convert me to Roman Catholicism.

Then come letters of a different kind requesting loans. They may be from the Royal Geographical Society, or the Earl’s Court Exhibition, or a lace collection, or perhaps some clergyman in the East End, but the letters come and the letters have to be answered.

The writers generally require the loan of curios from Iceland, Finland, Norway, Mexico, Morocco, Sicily; or any country, in fact, with which one’s name is associated. Lists have to be made, the objects looked out, packed, sent, placed, fetched, unpacked. Sometimes things get damaged, or lost, and then no one seems responsible.

People write asking for patronage; the loan of one’s name as a patroness to soup kitchens, charity concerts, balls, clubs, hospital bazaars, or collections by a friend for some charity. I was once asked by an unknown man to be godmother to his child. Soaps have asked for my patronage, and a motor-car was suggested as a free gift (it was the early days of motoring) if I would drive it through the streets of London.

Letters from women and men aspiring to literature—and verily half the world seems to think literary gifts are as common as pens and inkpots; letters from the natives of all the countries about which I have ever written, asking for help, or “for money to buy a ticket home because they are stranded in London and destitute”; or a fond father wishing to start his son in mining writes to ask my experience of mines in Mexico; while perhaps a mother thinks my experience would solve a question whether her daughter, who is a hospital nurse, would find a good opening in Canada; and, again, a girl starting a dairy enquires for hints on the Danish procedure.

Letters modestly ask me if through my medical connection I can get “a poor friend” seen by a doctor gratis; or if I can give someone an introduction for the stage, or hear somebody else sing or recite, and see what he or she had better do with their talent.

Oh dear! Oh dear! Letters never end, they are like the taxes in their persistency. Is there anything under the sun people will not bother a busy woman to obtain? The following letter was as much underlined as one of Queen Victoria’s epistles:

One effusion addressed to me begins:

In the same strain the letter runs on for several pages. For a long time the signature was a puzzle, and then gradually rose before me the vision of a man with whom I used to dance twenty years before as a girl; he was then a rich bachelor in Park Lane. A few years after this he married, and I only saw his wife two or three times. Surely on such a slight acquaintance the letter could not come from her. But it did.

What is to become of the endless stream of charming but incapable women, whose husbands, fathers, or brothers leave them in this deplorable condition?

Among the newspaper articles for which my pen has travelled over reams of paper—articles responsible for much of my strange correspondence—were some on hand-loom weaving.

Far away in the wilds of Sutherlandshire, chance once drew my steps to visit a little croft where homespuns were woven by the family, while the hens laid their eggs in the corner, or cackled in the rafters. Years went by and better days came to that household.

Appreciation is always pleasant, and such kindly words as those in the following simple letter are good to read. The excellent English used by the writer is a testimony to education in the Highlands of Scotland.

If the weaver’s letter was pleasant, the following reversed the shield. I have not often received abusive letters; but here is an example at random:

Possibly my correspondent would claim that her judicial merits in the matter of refinement extended to language.

A total stranger sent me the following—among epistolary curiosities—dated from a well-known ladies’ club:

Being struck with this letter, I sent for the girl. She came; tall, dark, handsome, and a lady. It appeared that she was not happy at home, but had means of her own. She had been abroad with friends, who invariably stayed in large hotels, all alike and all uninteresting, whilst she wanted to see something of the real life of the foreign lands she visited.

“But what do you want to do with me?” I asked.

“Travel with you. I would go as your secretary, as your maid, as anything if you would only take me. I would pay all my own expenses and promise to be useful.”

“Maids sew on buttons and lace up boots,” I replied, laughing.

“I’ll do all that and more, if you will only take me. I have your books, and I know I should love you, and I do so want to travel, to really travel as you do.”

She was delightfully enthusiastic; but, alas! I could not take her; the responsibility of a headstrong girl was too great. It might have turned out an ideal arrangement, but, again, it might have been a hideous failure, and when travelling to write books one has no time to tackle needless worries.

To end this list of letter-samples that more often tease than gratify the recipient are constant demands for subscriptions; appeals for gifts of books to poor clubs; letters from comparative strangers asking if they may bring a particular friend or a foreigner to call, as they wish to have a talk with me, or see over my house. In fact, no one who does not peep into a busy woman’s letter-box can have any idea of the amount of correspondence on all conceivable subjects it contains.

No doubt other workers have likewise helped—or are helping—the young or shiftless beginners who have not yet found foothold on the lowest rung of the ladder, round which so great a crowd is struggling. But do all, one wonders, learn, as has been my experience, how quickly eaten bread is sometimes forgotten by the eater: how often so-called gratitude is only the hope of fresh favours to come?

Does it ever strike people that it hurts?

A girl of my acquaintance was once very, very poor. She wrote asking my advice; saw me, and finally started in a small way as a manicurist. No move was made without claiming my advice at all times and seasons. She called and sat for hours asking this and that. She brought agreements to be looked over, earnings to discuss, address-books for suggestions; Heaven knows what she did not bring. At my persuasion she saved shillings and put them into the Post Office Savings Bank. Then it became pounds, and I arranged with a bank to open a little account for her, and later asked my stockbroker to invest her first saved hundred pounds in something very safe.

That first hundred saved, in a year or two became a thousand, and quickly doubled itself. She deserved it all, for she worked hard and saved diligently, but—well! the protectress was wanted less and less, the protestations of affection and admiration slowly ceased, and when my help could no longer be of use they came to an end.

Gratitude. Where is it? The people one helps most generously often turn away the moment they are firmly established.

Take another case. I started a certain girl in journalism. (I’ve started so many.) She worried me day and night for help and advice. I corrected MSS., suggested subjects, rewrote whole articles, and all because of feeling really sorry for her plight. She is now a flourishing journalist. We often meet, but she rarely takes the trouble to call because she need no longer get anything out of me.

Yes! after correcting four whole books, and that means hours and hours of dreary work, only in one case, to my surprise and delight—for such a small return gives one real pleasure—did I find a pretty acknowledgment, in a preface, of my part of the work.

People will come again and again, and a hundred times again, no matter how inconvenient the hour; they will drop in at meal-time, and knowing how poor they are, one feels forced to ask them to stop. But these very folk, once on their feet, sometimes forget the friendly outstretched hand of help by which they climbed.

It hurts.

On the other hand, some people are almost too grateful. A boy who was alone in lodgings and spent his Sundays with us in Harley Street in the long ago, went to China, where he has done splendidly; and every year since I have had a home of my own—since 1887, in fact—he has sent me a chest of tea, “because he never could forget the kindness of the past.” And he sends a similar recognition to my mother for the same reason. Such tokens of remembrance keep alive the friendships of those bygone days.

A woman who was with me for some years as secretary and left through ill-health never forgets to send me a kindly note on my birthday, a little thoughtfulness I greatly appreciate. One loves to be remembered. A penny bunch of violets often gives a hundredfold its weight in pleasure.

Yes, remembrance is always pleasant. Dear old Sir John Erichsen left me £300 in his will to buy a memento. I was too poor for mementoes when it came, so I invested it, and the £12 a year became of real tangible help. Or again, an old cousin in Scotland whom I only saw twice, left me, when she died, my paternal grandmother’s engagement-ring, and her delightful old tea-service of soft buff and white china ornamented with the daintiest landscape medallions.

Thank God, I have never been pursued in life by little ills, but three or four times big collapses have overtaken me. Typhoid, rheumatic fever, and blood-poisoning are no slight matters: but they are almost worth the suffering and pain for the pleasure of receiving such kindnesses from friends, letters of sympathy, flowers, fruit, wine, jellies, all have been left at my door, and I blessed the kind donors then as I bless them in remembrance now. Doubtless the severity of the illnesses that overtook me was due to intense overwork coupled with anxiety—overstrain invariably spells breakdown.

A horrible distrust overcame me at one time.

I used to go to bed worn out and weary, at last sleep would come. Then I would wake up with a start, feeling some awful calamity had overtaken me, that I had written something libellous or said something scandalous, and the Court of Law was waiting to receive me. No one would intentionally write a libel any more than they would cut a friend. I would see paragraphs chasing paragraphs across the page, just as the typed letters had turned red under my gaze when my eyes gave out a few years before. I used to get horribly anxious over my proof. Things I had rattled off when well were laborious now, and the anxiety they entailed was wellnigh unendurable.

It was merely a matter of health—a tonic and a rest put matters right.