nse rifled cannon. This was his mode of soliciting alms; and he
reminded me of the old beggar who appealed so touchingly to the charitable
sympathies of Gil Blas, taking aim at him from the roadside with a
long-barrelled musket. The intentness and directness of his silent appeal,
his close and unrelenting attack upon your individuality, respectful as it
seemed, was the very flower of insolence; or, if you give it a possibly
truer interpretation, it was the tyrannical effort of a man endowed with
great natural force of character to constrain your reluctant will to his
purpose. Apparently, he had staked his salvation upon the ultimate success
of a daily struggle between himself and me, the triumph of which would
compel me to become a tributary to the hat that lay on the pavement beside
him. Man or fiend, however, there was a stubbornness in his intended
victim which this massive fragment of a mighty personality had not
altogether reckoned upon, and by its aid I was enabled to pass him at my
customary pace hundreds of times over, quietly meeting his terribly
respectful eye, and allowing him the fair chance which I felt to be his
due, to subjugate me, if he really had the strength for it. He never
succeeded, but, on the other hand, never gave up the contest; and should I
ever walk those streets again, I am certain that the truncated tyrant will
sprout up through the pavement and look me fixedly in the eye, and perhaps
get the victory.

I should think all the more highly of myself, if I had shown equal heroism
in resisting another class of beggarly depredators, who assailed me on my
weaker side and won an easy spoil. Such was the sanctimonious clergyman,
with his white cravat, who visited me with a subscription-paper, which he
himself had drawn up, in a case of heart-rending distress;--the
respectable and ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy and silent
in his own person, but accompanied by a sympathizing friend, who bore
testimony to his integrity, and stated the unavoidable misfortunes that
had crushed him down;--or the delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had
been bred in affluence, but was suddenly thrown upon the perilous
charities of the world by the death of an indulgent, but secretly
insolvent father, or the commercial catastrophe and simultaneous suicide
of the best of husbands;--or the gifted, but unsuccessful author,
appealing to my fraternal sympathies, generously rejoicing in some small
prosperities w