The Miller of Deanhaugh Author:James Ballantine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. What's lent to the orphan heaven pays back tenfold ;— Far better gain hearts than keep red rusty gold : And when your soul wings its way, trembli... more »ng in fear, How cheering to meet them ye sheltered while here. Proverb. Do not know, dear reader, whether you have ever experienced the delightful emotion felt by those who have been instrumental in rescuing virtuous worth from the iron grasp of poverty. If you have not, let me counsel you instantly to yield to the genial impulses of your nature, and put yourself in the way of enjoying this luxury. Objects, ay, and deserving objects, heaven knows, are always to be found in abundance, on which to exercise your benevolence. The inmates of yon wretched hovel on the bleak and lonely moor, contented though they may appear, are sadly scant of food and raiment, wherewith to encounter the inclemency of winter. Thousands are huddled together in the narrow lanes and alleys of large towns, grawling for food among the refuse of your kitchens, and vainly attempting to hide their nakedness with miserable patches of fluttering and ragged garments. Select, then, good reader, from among these victims of poverty those you may think most needy and deserving. They surely are not all dissipated and idle. See these children of want, mark how they are endeavouring, by a thousand little wiles, to arrest your attention, to win your kind look, to awaken your sympathy. Repel them not by your coldness, then, nor flee them as if they had nothing in common with yourself; as if they were the doomed children of pestilence. Remember they are human beings, with human affections, and human failings it may be, but also human feelings. They are, like yourself, living and breathing transcripts of the divinity. If, then, surrounded by want and misery as ...« less