N. D.
CVIII
Clemency Power to Patricia Power
Angel Pat,—I am so sorry about Herself. Of course I’ll come directly, if it’s necessary. I have told Miss Raby and she agrees. Let me have a telegram anyhow directly you get this. I’ll tell you a secret, Pat. I have an admirer, and at any moment he may sue for my hand! Or such is my unmaidenly guess. It’s this plaguey Kerry voice of mine. Every one says sweet things about it, but for this boy—Miss Raby’s nephew who has been staying here—it’s been too much entirely. That he will propose I feel certain and I wish he wouldn’t. I was bothered enough in France, but one doesn’t take War proposals seriously, especially when the men are away from their own country. But this boy is as eager as a trout stream.—Yours,
Clem.
CIX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
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.”