Remember, I place no limits to your generosities.

As to your magnificent plans of establishing asylums and public institutions for the lame, the halt, and the blind, perhaps my single means might not be able to accomplish them,--delightful as it would be to have an angel following in my footsteps, and binding up the wounds of suffering humanity." He smiled with radiant good-humor at my Quixotic schemes.

Then he told me, that since he had been in the city he had given thousands to the charitable associations which spread in great lifegiving veins through every part of the metropolis.
"You think I am living in vain, my Gabriella," he said, rising and walking the length of the splendid apartment and again returning, "because I do not have my allotted daily task to perform; because I do not go forth, like the lawyer, with a green bag under my arm; like the minister, with a sermon in my pocket; or the doctor, with powders and pills.

If necessity imposed such tasks on me, I suppose I should perform them with as good a grace as the rest; but surely it would ill become me to enter the lists with my needier brethren, and take the bread from their desiring lips.

Every profession is crowded.