Have you ever tried to give a beggar a five-pound note?
I did this morning.
She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches in Sackville Street.

She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.
"Here," said I to myself, "is an opportunity of bringing unimagined gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature's life." I pressed a five-pound note into her hand and passed on.

She ran after me, terror on her face.
"I daren't take it, sir; they would say I had stolen it, and I should be locked up.

No one would believe a gentleman had given it to me." She trembled, overwhelmed by the colossal fortune that might, and yet might not, be hers.

I sympathised, but not having the change in gold, I could do no more than listen to an incoherent tale of misery, which did not aid the solution of the problem.