an order entitling you to receive from a
respectable dealer, at wholesale prices, such
articles of clothing as you may most need,
equal in value to the amount of your deposits."
This is what we have said, and that the poor
families are alive to the full advantages of such
a system of weekly economy is best proved by
the fact of our list containing the names of
eighteen hundred members, with applicants
far beyond that number.

The weekly subscription to our society
may be from one penny to threepence; by
far the greater number being for the higher
sum, only fifty-seven last year being for one
penny, and one hundred and three for
twopence. Small as these sums are, we are
compelled to make it imperative that no arrears
over two months be permitted, or it would
soon be out of the power of very many to
make up their deficiency before the close of
the year, a stipulation upon which depends
the obtaining of the yearly ticket. Defaulters
have their money returned to them, and of
those, there are sometimes so many as ten
per cent. The amount of money lodged in
my hands as treasurer during the year, in
these small sums, is now about nine hundred
pounds, in twenty-six thousand five hundred
deposits.

"When I first assumed the duties of
treasurer, not very long since, I confess to having
some few misgivings as to the smoothness of
the water through which my office would lead
me. I pictured to myself all sorts of
irreconciliable errors in the totals of the weekly
coppers; no end of difficulties with the five
hundred and odd old women and children,
(one of our last year's subscribers was a
baby in arms!) and at the end of the year
a frightful phalanx of discontented
defaulters, and still more troublesome ticket-holders.
But, somehow or other, all these
terrors have proved as baseless as the Cock
Lane Ghost. The alarmists who, in 1851,
prophesied ruinous results at the Great
Exhibition from the admission of the shilling
visitors, were not more at fault than, was I in
my estimation of the trouble arising from my
Penny Depositors.

Our office arrangements are on the most
economical scale: the establishment could
scarcely cost less, for it stands us in precisely
nothing per annum. My treasury is one end
of the National School Room of St. John's
Over-the-Water; somewhat larger than I
require, but I place a range of desks so as to
form a sort of counter, behind which I sit
enthroned on the schoolmaster's high stool,
with that functionary at my side to act as
teller cashier, bookkeeper, and clerk. In this
way we manage to knock up a marvellously
snug little sort of Bank Parlour behind those
inky pieces of furniture, and with the aid of
a pair of sixpenny moulds, we look quite
splendid and imposing when you are close to
us, provided the fog does not rush in too
thickly on winter evenings, and extinguish us.

If our official staff is condensed and frugal,
not less concise is our system of accounts. I
am quite aware that I shall be laughed at by
Mr. Coleman, the king of London accountants,
and that your veteran bookkeepers of
Lombard Street will despise and pity me,
when I make the admission—which I am
bound to do—that I keep but one rather
small, humble looking book, which I make
answer the purposes of day-book, cash-book,
register, and ledger, and that there is but one
entry needed for each payment. What is
more than all this, I have never yet been so
much as one shilling in error at the end of
the year, and have never had a difference
with any one of our eighteen hundred women
and children, which latter fact says as much
in their favour as my own.

It will be but right that I proceed to show,
as well as I can, in what way our Penny
Society has thriven so long and so completely;
how we avoid the shoals and rocks, and how
we manage to navigate in tolerably smooth
water. The main secret of our success has
been in having a few good simple rules and
closely adhering to them.

I have said that we admit subscribers of
one penny, twopence, or threepence a week;
for then at the commencement of each of our
years, we issue penny or twopenny cards as
the case may be, and a member having once
elected to what amount he will subscribe is
bound to adhere to it. Hence we save any
confusion or risk of error, which might arise
if they were allowed to pay in unfixed sums.
At the end, therefore, of the year, it is quite
clear, without any abstruse calculation, that
the holder of a penny card will be entitled to
the sum of four shillings and fourpence, and
so on. These cards are ruled in squares for
the fifty-two weeks; each card bears a
number and name corresponding to their
duplicates in my model ledger and
cash-book.

This book is ruled quite across the wide
pages, in fifty-two columns, representing the
weeks; the continued addition of the
payments entered against all the eighteen
hundred names on any one of the Mondays
gives the amount of cash received, and to be
paid into our banker's, whilst the receipts
against any one name across the page
represent the amount at the credit of the
member.

Our Monday evenings are pleasant interesting
times. I would earnestly recommend any
gentlemen who know not how to amuse
themselves or how to busy their minds and
bodies for the benefit of their poorer fellow-
citizens, to pay a visit to the National School
Rooms of St. John's Over-the-Water upon
any Monday evening that may suit them, and
they will witness what I think must instruct
and interest them.

As the clock strikes the hour of five, I take
my station in our little "Bank Parlour," upon
the tall stool, wipe my spectacles—I have