Dear Verena, I now send you some notes collected from the perusal of the gigantic volume on the Endowed Charities of London as they were examined by a commission early in the last century. It is a monument to the public-spirited dead. In London the benefactions run chiefly to free schools, alms-houses, subsidized sermons and doles of bread and coal—“sea coal,” as it is usually called. Now and then there is an original touch, as when one Gilbert Keate gave to the parish of St. Dunstan’s in the East—you know, the church with the lovely spire built on flying buttresses—“£60, to be lent gratis, yearly, during the space of four years, to three young men inhabitants of this parish (one of them to be of the Dolphin precinct), by the vestry, to each £20 on good security, by bond for repayment at four years’ end, as the inhabitants in vestry should think fit.”

Samuel Wilson did even better, his will, dated October 27th, 1766, containing this clause: “And my mind and will further is, that the said sum of twenty thousand pounds, or whatever sum be so paid by my said executors to the said chamberlain, shall be and remain as a perpetual fund, to be lent to young men who have been set up one year, or not more than two years, in some trade or manufacture, in the city of London, or within three miles thereof, and can give satisfactory security for the repayment of the money so lent to them; ... and further my mind and will is, that no part of this money shall be lent to an alehouse keeper, a distiller or vendor of distilled liquors.”

That seems to me to be a very excellent disposition of money; but probably it is not in your line. The Corporation of London was appointed to manage the charity, but as a rule these rich City men left their money to their Chartered Companies for distribution. Where alms-houses, for example, are built and endowed there must obviously be some organization to carry them on; and the City Companies, who are commonly supposed to devote their time to eating and drinking, really exist largely for this admirable purpose. So do churchwardens; carrying round the plate is but a small part of their duties.

Here is a pretty compliment, to take the taste of all that away:—

A letter from an old friend making his first long voyage reaches me to-day from Aden. He says, “Why don’t artists oftener paint circular pictures? Nothing could be more beautiful than the views of water and sky, and now and then of scenery or buildings, that I have been getting through my porthole. I would almost go so far as to say that round pictures are the only ones—at any rate of the open air. You should get one of the Galleries to arrange a Porthole Exhibition and start the fashion.”—Good night,

R. H.

P.S.—Here is the latest definition of appendicitis. “The thing you have the day before your doctor buys a Rolls-Royce.”