from me would place her on the
pinnacle as an artist. Among all the Cooper clan, to which she was
allied, there was not one who ever begged from me, they having all found
that the ripest nuts are those which fall from the tree of their own
accord, or are blown earthward by the soft breezes of benevolence, and
not those which are violently beaten down. She began by pitiful appeals;
she was moving, but I did not budge. She grew pathetic; she touched on
the stolen horse; she paused, and gushed almost to tears, as much as to
say, If it must be, you _shall_ know all. Ruin stared them in the face;
poverty was crushing them. It was well acted,--rather in the Bernhardt
style, which, if M. Ondit speaks the truth, is also employed rather
extensively for acquiring "de monish." I looked at the van, of which the
Browns are proud, and inquired if it were true that it had been insured
for a hundred pounds, as George had recently boasted. Persuasion having
failed, Mrs. Brown tried bold defiance, saying that they needed no
company who were no good to them, and plainly said to me I might be gone.
It was her last card, thinking that a threat to dissolve our acquaintance
would drive me to capitulate, and it failed. I laughed, went into the
van, sat down, took out my brandy flask, and then accepted some bread and
ale, and, to please them, read aloud all the papers acquitting George
from all guilt as concerned the stolen horse,--papers which, he declared,
had cost him full five pounds. This was a sad come-down from the story
first told. Then I seriously rated his wife for begging from me. "You
know well enough," I said, "that I give all I can spare to your family
and your people when they are sick or poor. And here you are, the
richest Romanys on the road between Windsor and the Boro Gav, begging a
friend, who knows all about you, for money! Now, here is a shilling.
Take it. Have half a crown? Two of 'em! No! Oh, you don't want it
here in your own house. Well, you have some decency left, and to save
your credit I won't make you take it. And you scandalize me, a gentleman
and a friend, just to show this tramp of a Stanley _juva_, who hasn't
even got a drag [wagon], that you can beat her _a mongerin mandy_
[begging me]."

Mrs. Brown assented volubly to everything, and all the time I saw in her
smiling eyes, ever agreeing to all, and heard from her voluble lips
nothing but the _lie_,--that lie which is the mental action and i