A friend tells me that when she was but six years old she heard her father say impatiently, as his wife handed him a bill: 

“I can’t pay this!  At the rate at which bills come in nowadays, I soon will not have a cent left in the world.  It is enough to bankrupt a man!”

At bedtime that night the little daughter asked her mother, with the indifferent air children so soon learn to assume: 

“Mamma, what becomes of people when all their money is gone, and they can’t pay their bills?”

“Sometimes, dear,” answered the unsuspicious mother, “their houses and belongings are sold to pay their bills.”

“And when people have no house, and no money, and nothing left, where do they go?  Do they starve to death?”

“They generally go to the poorhouse, my daughter.”

“Oh, mamma!” quavered the little voice, “don’t you think that is dreadful?”

“Very dreadful, darling!  Now go to sleep.”

To sleep!  How could she, with the grim doors of the home for the county paupers yawning blackly to receive her?  All through the night was the horror upon her, and to this day she remembers the sickening thrill that swept over her while playing with a little friend, when the thought occurred: 

“If this girl’s mother knew that we were going to the poorhouse, she would not let her play with me.”

Little by little the impression wore off, aided in the dissipation by the sight of numerous rolls of bills which papa occasionally drew from his pocket.  But not once in all that time did the child relax the strict guard set upon her lips, and sob out her fear to her mother.  She does not now know why she did not do it, except that she could not.

An otherwise judicious father talks over all his business difficulties with his seven-year-old son.  The grown man does not know what a strain the anxiety and uncertainty of his father’s ventures are to the embryo financier.  Not long ago the father announced to him: 

“Well, Harold, that man I was telling you of has failed—­lost his money—­and one thousand dollars of mine have gone with it.”

The boy’s white, set face would have alarmed a more observant man.

“Oh, papa! what shall we do!”

“Get along somehow, my boy!” was the unsatisfactory answer.

Then, as the boy sadly and slowly left the room, the man to whom one thousand dollars were no more than one dime to this anxious child, explained, laughingly, to a friend, that “that little fellow was really wonderful; he understood business, and was as much interested in it as a man of forty could be.”