Anne's terrible good nature, and other stories for children

by E. V. Lucas

After they had been to lunch at Birch’s, where they had mock turtle soup and oyster patties, they went home, and Alison poured all the threepenny bits into a depression in a cushion from the sofa, and counted them into a hundred piles of ten each. Then she got a wooden writing-desk, which had been given her by her grandmother, and emptied out all the treasures it contained, and put fifty of the little heaps into the large part of the writing-case, and the remaining fifty little heaps into the compartment for pens and sealing-wax, and locked it up again.

IV

For the next few days Alison collected advice about the spending of her money from every one she knew. All her friends were asked to give their opinions, and thus gradually she decided upon the best way to spend the five hundred threepenny bits which were for others.

Her first thought was naturally for her mother, who was an invalid. Mrs. Muirhead was very fond of flowers, and so Alison went at once to see the old flower-woman who sits outside Kensington High Street Station, and who was so cross with the Suffragettes in self-denial week for interfering with her “pitch,” as she called it; and Alison arranged with her for a threepenny bunch of whatever was in season to be taken to her mother twice every week, on Saturdays and Wednesdays, for a year, and, to the old woman’s intense astonishment, she gave her one hundred and four of her threepenny bits.

Her uncle Mordaunt advised her to take in a weekly illustrated paper—say the Sphere—and, after she had looked at it herself, to send it to one of the lighthouses, where the men are very lonely and unentertained. Alison thought this was a very good idea. The Sphere cost two threepences a week, and postage a halfpenny, or one hundred and twelve threepences—altogether one pound eight shillings.

Alison had now spent two hundred and sixteen threepenny bits, and, having arranged these two things, she decided to wait till Christmas came nearer (it was now July) before she spent any more large sums, always, however, keeping a few threepenny bits handy in her purse in case of meeting any particularly hard case, such as a very blind man, or a begging mother with a dreadfully cold little baby, or a Punch and Judy man with a really nice face, or a little boy who had fallen down and hurt himself badly, or an old woman who ought to be riding in a ’bus. In this way she got rid of fifty of her little coins before Christmas came near enough for her once more to think of little else but threepenny plans.

It was then that she found Tommy Cathcart so useful. Tommy Cathcart was one of her father’s articled pupils, and it was he who reminded Alison of the claims of sandwichmen. Sandwichmen have an awfully bad time, Tommy explained to her. It is almost the last thing men do. No one carries sandwich-boards until he has failed in every other way.

THESE TOMMY CATHCART AND SHE SLIPPED INTO THE HANDS OF THE SANDWICH-MEN.

After talking it over very seriously, they went together to a tobacconist near the Strand, who undertook to make up thirty little packets for threepence each, containing a clay pipe and tobacco, and these Tommy Cathcart and she slipped into the hands of the sandwichmen as they drifted by in Regent Street, in the Strand, and in Oxford Street, while the rest were given to a little group of the men who were resting, with their sandwich-boards leaned against the wall, in a court near Shaftesbury Avenue.