in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication
with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;
there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a
reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;
a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a
purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or
sign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or
a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and
breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to
you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it. But
the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no
recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in
his direction, and never a word to excuse you.

Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the
beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning." When
complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but
what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with
more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of
manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To the
simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a
striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible
act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste
answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. An
elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral
_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain
number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally
translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to
English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman
who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
It is only in another climate, and amid othe