r manners, that one cannot
recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all
speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached,
and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect
"familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman
could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity
of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so
complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of
excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere in
the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to
beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can
hardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly well
known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the
rich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be some
dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive
haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by
travellers.

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically
as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put
themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;
but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appeals
vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does not
seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, a
scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and
the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating
that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a
simply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It
is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of
intercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress those
conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the
presence, the voice, and the