bank, let these figures be taken. At the
Birmingham Savings Bank, seventeen pounds is the
average balance owned by each depositor. At
the Birmingham Penny Bank, it is not seventeen
shillings; and a sum now rapidly growing
towards a hundred thousand pounds has passed
through that Penny Bank in deposits of small
savings averaging less than three shillings a
piece. At Halifax, the average amount paid in
at once has not been two shillings. At
Carborough, it has been only eightpence, and the
average balance kept in the Bank by its
customers is six shillings and fourpence. At
Shenstone, near Lichfleld, threepence-halfpenny is
the average sum paid in at one time by a
customer. Yet, upon such terms, throughout the
country, many thousands of accounts are opened.

Many of these establishments place in the
savings bank, or in a joint-stock bank yielding
interest upon deposits, the bulk of the money of
their customers, and allow two per cent., or
more, on every small pile of penny savings.
Others, need all the interest to cover the expense
of management. It is not, however, for the
sake of interest that money is deposited; where
no interest at all can be afforded, the Bank is
seldom found to prosper less. The object of
the prudent depositor, is only to place a little
hoard beyond the reach of any momentary
impulse, while it shall yet remain at hand against
the time of a substantial necessity. Three days
or a week's notice must be given before money
can be drawn out of a Penny Bank. For every
case of absolute necessity, but in few cases of
mere transitory impulse, that is equivalent to
actual possession of the money.

Few who are born to comfort know how
various, how sacred, and how simple, are the
impulses that send the poor man's hand into his
pocket when there is a sixpence in it. Rich
and poor, we are all hospitable if we are
good for anything. There are some who know
what is the hospitality of giving soup, fish, and
companionship, to men who have soup, fish,
and company at home; who, nine times in a
dozen, reckon it irksome to leave home at
all; and prefer to decline dining with a friend
who cannot show himself, as to wine, cookery,
and table-talk, a skilful entertainer. There are
others who know what it is to give a dinner
in the uttermost sense of the phrase. When
the poor man feels a poorer comrade's claim
upon his heart, God only knows the luxury he
finds in dealing generously by him. To make
a Sunday feast of beef and pudding on the table
that is spread day after day with scanty fare,
to pour beer into the glass and cheery words
into the ear of a down-hearted brother, and,
forgetting troubles for an hour or two to share
with him the consolations of an after-dinner
pipe, is not a light temptation under which only
the thoughtless fall.

"Wife, old woman, you have been toiling and
pining in your faithful love, and we are very
poor, though we work hard and do our best.
Day after day I have seen you looking anxious
and distressed, and slatternly, through being

tired and over-worked. This is our wedding-
day—you mind it! What a peck of business It
has brought us! There's our poor little Willy,
who has gone, and—But you mustn't cry
to-day; plenty are left. There's more love than
meat in the house. In spite of that, or because
of that, let's have it all our own way for once in
a time, and let the children see that life is not all
made up of struggling!" What sacred holidays
are these; full of delicious rest, islands of bliss
in which the storm-tost people anchor to forget
their cockroaches and mouldy biscuit; where
the air is odorous with flowers, and the fruits
that grow under the idler's hand press their
deights into his palm. The luxury of meat
unstinted, to those who eat it sparely day by day,
of idleness and pleasure now and then to those
whose lives are but too full of labour and pain,
the strength of a poor man's pity for another
whose distress seems to be greater than his
own—it makes the poorest quarters of our
towns a harvest-field to beggars. This and
much more than this, will force the hand of the
poor Englishman to break into a hoard that lies
immediately at his fingers' ends. We talk
abundantly about the gin-shop, not without
remembering by what temptations poor creatures
are gathered into flocks and driven cruelly into
those slaughter-houses of the inner life. But
we do not give enough thought to the sources
of ten thousand acts of improvidence over which
good angels may rejoice rather than weep. It
is one of the chief griefs of poverty that it
compels natural men to deny themselves more
than it is good that they should be denied—
indulgence of right wishes, obedience to pure and
worthy promptings of the heart.

There is a simplicity of mind in those who
have been slightly educated, which gives to
good impulses more strength and freedom
than they usually have among persons who test
what is in them by the long ana wide experience
of which all common knowledge is but the
result. A household in which very few shillings
are enough to form a valuable and substantial
saving, enough to tide over a day of unexpected
loss, to meet some serious claim, or to find the
little luxury that may be life to a sick child,
must not be spent without deliberation. It is
good to put it away in a teapot, and to put the
teapot on a high shelf. If the shelf be so high
that one must take two or three days to reach
it, that is better still. There will be time for
reflection interposed between the wish to spend
it and the getting it to spend, and what is done
will be done only for sufficient reason. This
kind of storing does not forbid—why should it?
—expenditure on seasonable pleasures.
Whitsuntide has caused a cheery run upon our Penny
Banks, for shillings very slowly saved, to yield a
holiday worth having. Only it is well that such
holidays should be deliberately chosen, and
appointed, and provided for, as the great household
events they are: not idly snatched on the
first prompting of a bit of outer sunshine.

We sit by the paying-out table of the Penny
Bank. There is one desk at which money for