' and goes past and
takes the plate with him.

"'A black curse on your insolence!' says I; and then I grips the
laughing woman by the arm and whispers, 'If you make that noise again,
I'll break your head,' and she sits down and begins to cry like the
other.

"There is one more collecting-man, who comes last, and he is the Duke,
who lives at the big house.

"The nobility and gentry, my daughter, when they are the real thing,
has, like the real Romans, a quickness to catch your meaning, and a
politeness of manner which you doesn't meet with among such people as
the keeper of a small shop or the master of a workhouse. The Duke was a
very old man, with bent shoulders and the slow step of age, and I thinks
he did not see or hear very quickly; and when I beckons to him he goes
past. But when he is some way past he looks back. And when he sees my
hand out, he turns and comes slowly down again, and hands me the plate
with as much politeness as if I had been in his own pew, and he says in
a low voice, 'I beg your pardon.'

"But when I sees him stumbling back, and knows that in his politeness he
will bring me the plate, there comes a fear on me, my daughter, that he
may see the ten pieces of gold and think I has stolen them. And then I
knows not what I shall do, for the nobility and gentry, though quick and
polite in a matter of obliging the poor, such as this one,--when they
sits as poknees[C] to administer justice, loses both their good sense
and their good manners as completely as any of the police.

"But it comes to me also that being such a real one--such an
out-and-outer--his politeness may be so great that he may look another
way, rather than peep and pry to see what the poor workhouse-company
woman puts into the plate. And I am right, my daughter, for he looks
away, and I lays the ten golden sovereigns in the plate, and he gives a
little smile and a little bow, and goes slowly and stumblingly to the
upper end, where the clergyman is still speaking verses.

"And then, my daughter, my hands, which made the gold sovereigns so
hot, turns very hot, and I gets up and goes out of the church with as
much respectfulness and quiet as I am able.

"And I tries not to look at her face as I turns to shut the door, but I
was unable to keep myself from doing so, and as it looked then I can see
it now, my dear, and I know I shall remember it till I die. I thinks
somehow that she was praying, though it was not a praying part of the