Doctor Phillips, aged 74, warned by growing
infirmities, had sold a tidy practice, with house,
furniture, and good will, for a fair price; and put
it in the bank, awaiting some investment. The
money was gone now, and the poor old doctor,
with a wife and daughter and a crutch, was at
once a pauper and an exile: for he had sold
under the usual condition, not to practise within
so many miles of his successor. He went to that
successor, and begged permission to be his
assistant at a small, small, salary. " I want a
younger man," was the reply. Then he went
round to his old patients, and begged a few half
guineas to get him a horse and chaise and keep
him over the first month in his new place. They
pitied him, but most of them were sufferers too
by Hardie, and all they gave him did but buy a
donkey and cart; and with that he and his went
slowly and sadly to a village ten miles distant
from the place, where all his life had been spent
in comfort and good credit. The poor old
gentleman often looked back from his cart at the
church spires of Barkington.

From seventeen till now almost four score,
There lived he, but now lived there no more.
At seventeen many their fortunes seek;
But at four score it is too old a week.

Arrived at his village, he had to sell his donkey,
and trust to his crutch. And so Infirmity crept
about begging leave to cure Disease—with what
success may be inferred from this: Miss Phillips,
a lady-like girl of eighteen, was taken up by
Farmer Giles before Squire Langton, for stealing
turnips out of a field: the farmer was hard, and
his losses in Hardie's bank had made him bitter
hard, so the poor girl's excuse, that she could
not let her father starve, had no effect on him:
to jail she should go.*

* I find, however, that Squire Langton resolutely
refused to commit Miss Phillips. The real reason, I
suspect, was, that he had a respect for the Gospel,
and not much for the law, except those invaluable
clauses which restrain poaching. 'The reason he
gave was: " Turnips be hanged! If she hadn't eaten
them, the fly would." However, he found means
to muzzle Giles, and sent the old doctor two couple
of rabbits.

Took to the national vice, and went to the
national dogs, Thomas Fisher, a saving tinman,
and a bachelor: so I expect no pity for him.

To the same jail, by the same road, dragging
their families, went the Rev. Henry Scudamore,
a curate; Philip Hall, a linendraper; Neil Pratt,
a shoemaker; Simon Harris, a greengrocer; and
a few more; but the above were all prudent,
laborious men, who took a friendly glass, but
seldom exceeded, until Hardie's bankruptcy drove
them to the devil of drink for comfort.

Turned professional thief, Joseph Locke, working
locksmith, who had just saved money enough
to buy a shop and good will; and now lost it
every penny.

Turned Atheist, and burnt the family Bible
before his weeping wife and terrified children
and gaping servant girl, Mr. Williams, a Sunday-
school teacher, known hitherto only as a mild,
respectable man, a teetotaller, and a good parent
and husband. He did not take to drinking; but
he did to cursing; and forbade his own flesh
and blood ever to enter a church again. This
man became an outcast, shunned by all.

Three elderly sisters, the Misses Lunley, well
born and bred, lived together on their funds
which, small singly, united made a decent
competence. Two of them had refused marriage in
early life for fear the third should fall into less
tender hands than theirs. For Miss Blanche
Lunley was a cripple: disorder of the spine had
robbed her, in youth's very bloom, of the power
not only to dance, as you girls do, but to walk
or even stand upright; leaving her two active
little hands, and a heart as nearly angelic as we
are likely to see here on earth.

She lay all day long, on a little iron bedstead,
at the window of their back parlour that looked
on a sunny little lawn; working eagerly for the
poor; teaching the poor, young and old, to read,
chiefly those of her own sex; hearing the sorrows
of the poor, composing the quarrels of the poor,
relieving their genuine necessities with a little
money, and much ingenuity, and labour.

Some poor woman, in a moment of inspiration,
called Miss Blanche " the sunshine of the poor."
The word was instantly caught up in the parish,
and had now this many years gently displaced
"Lunley," and settled on her here below, and its
echo gone before her up to Heaven.

The poor " sunshine of the poor" was happy:
Life was sweet to her. To know whether this is
so, it is useless to inquire of the backbone; or
the limbs: look at the face! She lay at her
window in the kindred sunshine, and in a world
of sturdy, able, agile cursers, grumblers, and
yawners, her face, pale as ashes, wore the eternal
sunshine of a happy, holy, smile.

But there came one to her bedside and told
her the Bank was broken, and all the money
gone she and her sisters had lent Mr. Hardie.

The saint clasped her hands and said, " Oh my
poor people! What will become of them?"
And the tears ran down her pale and now sorrowful
cheeks.

At this time she did not know the full extent
of their losses.

But they had given Mr. Hardie a power of
attorney to draw out all their consols. That
remorseless man had abused the discretion
this gave him, and beggared them—they were
his personal friends too— to swell his secret
hoard.

When "the sunshine of the poor" heard this,
and knew that she was now the poorest of the
poor, she clasped her hands and cried, " Oh my
poor sisters! my poor sisters!" and she could
work no more for sighing.

The next morning found the sunshine of the
poor extinct, in her little bed: ay, dead of grief
with no grain of egotism in it; gone straight to
Heaven without one angry word against Richard
Hardie or any other.