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CHARITABLE REMINISCENCES.
As the new Benevolent Association has had the
effect of withdrawing beggars from the streets, and as
Professional Mendicancy bids fair to be presently
ranked with the Lost Arts, to preserve some records
of this noble branch of industry, I have endeavored to
recall certain traits and peculiarities of individual
members of the order whom I have known, and whose
forms I now miss from their accustomed haunts. In
so doing, I confess to feeling a certain regret at this
decay of Professional Begging, for I hold the theory
that mankind are bettered by the occasional spectacle
of misery, whether simulated or not, on the same
principle that our sympathies are enlarged by the
fictitious woes of the Drama, though we know that
the actors are insincere. Perhaps I am indiscreet in
saying that I have rewarded the artfully dressed and
well acted performance of the begging impostor
through the same impulse that impelled me to expend
a dollar in witnessing the counterfeited sorrows
of poor “Triplet,” as represented by Charles Wheatleigh.
I did not quarrel with deceit in either case.
the moral responsibility rested with the performer.
The principal figure that I now mourn over as lost
forever is one that may have been familiar to many
of my readers. It was that of a dark-complexioned,
black-eyed, foreign-looking woman, who supported
in her arms a sickly baby. As a pathological phenomen
on the baby was especially interesting, having
presented the Hippocratic face and other symptoms
of immediate dissolution, without change for the
past three years. The woman never verbally solicited
arms. Her appearance was always mute, mysterious
and sudden. She made no other appeal than
that which the dramatic tableau of herself and baby
suggested, with an outstretched hand and deprecating
eye sometimes superadded. She usually stood in
my doorway, silent and patient, intimating her presence,
if my attention were preoccupied, by a slight
cough from her baby, whom I shall always believe
had its part to play in this little pantomime, and generally
obeyed a secret signal from the maternal hand.
It was useless for me to refuse alms, to plead business
or affect inattention. She never moved; her
position was always taken with an appearance of
latent capabilities of endurance and experience in
waiting which never failed to impress me with awe
and the futility of any hope of escape. There was also
something in the reproachful expression of her eye,
which plainly said to me, as I bent over my paper,
“Go on with your mock sentimentalities and simulated
pathos; portray the imaginary sufferings of
but look you, sir, here is real misery! Here
is genuine suffering!” I confess that this artful suggestion
usually brought me down. In three minutes
after she had thus invested the citadel, I usually surrendered
at discretion without a gun having been
fired on either side. She received my offering and
retired as mutely and mysteriously as she had appeared.
Perhaps it was well for me that she did
not know her strength. I might have been forced,
had this terrible woman been conscious of her real
power, to have borrowed money which I could not
pay, or have forged a check to purchase immunity
from her awful presence. I hardly know if I make
myself understood, and yet I am unable to define
my meaning more clearly when I say that there was
something in her glance which suggested to the person
appealed to, when in the presence of others, a
certain idea of some individual responsibility for her
sufferings, which, while it never failed to affect him
with a mingled sense of ludicrousness and terror, always
made an impression of unqualified gravity on
the minds of the bystanders. As she has disappeared
within the last month, I imagine that she has found a
home at the San Francisco Benevolent Association—
at least, I cannot conceive of any charity, however
guarded by wholesome checks or sharp-eyed almoners,
that could resist that mute apparition. I should
like to go there and inquire about her and also learn
if the baby was convalescent or dead, but I am satisfied
that she would rise up a mute and reproachful
would end in the Association instantly transferring
her to my hands.
My next familiar mendicant was a vendor of
printed ballads. These effusions were so stale, atrocious,
and unsalable in their character, that it was
easy to detect that hypocrisy, which—in imitation of
more ambitious beggary—veiled the real eleemosynary
appeal, under the thin pretext of offering an
equivalent. This beggar—an aged female in a rusty
bonnet—I unconsciously precipitated upon myself in
an evil moment. On our first meeting, while distractedly
turning over the ballads, I came upon a certain
production entitled, I think, “The Fire Zouave,”
and was struck with the truly patriotic and American
manner in which “Zouave” was made to rhyme in
different stanzas with “grave, brave, save and glaive.”
As I purchased it at once, with a gratified expression
of countenance, it soon became evident that the
act was misconstrued by my poor friend, who, from
that moment, never ceased to haunt me. Perhaps,
in the whole course of her precarious existence, she
had never before sold a ballad. My solitary purchase
evidently made me, in her eyes, a customer, and
in a measure exalted her vocation; so, thereafter, she
regularly used to look in at my door, with a chirping
confident air, and the question, “Any more songs
to-day?” as though it were some necessary article of
daily consumption. I never took any more of her
songs, although that circumstance did not shake her
faith in my literary taste; my abstinence from this
charitable motives. She was finally absorbed by the
S. F. B. A., who have probably made a proper disposition
of her effects. She was a little old woman,
of Celtic origin, predisposed to melancholy, and looking
as if she had read most of her ballads.
My next reminiscence takes the shape of a very
seedy individual, who had, for three or four years,
been vainly attempting to get back to his relatives in
Illinois, where sympathizing friends and a comfortable
alms-house awaited him. Only a few dollars, he
informed me—the uncontributed remainder of the
amount necessary to purchase a steerage ticket—
stood in his way. These last few dollars seem to
have been most difficult to get—and he had wandered
about, a sort of antithetical Flying Dutchman, fore-ever
putting to sea, yet never getting away from
shore. He was a “49-er,” and had recently been
blown up in a tunnel, or had fallen down a shaft, I
forget which. This sad accident obliged him to use
large quantities of whisky as a liniment, which, he
informed me, occasioned the mild fragrance which
his garments exhaled. Though belonging to the
same class, he was not to be confounded with the unfortunate
miner who could not get back to his claim
without pecuniary assistance, or the desolate Italian,
who hopelessly handed you a document in a foreign
language, very much bethumbed and illegible—which,
in your ignorance of the tongue, you couldn't help
suspiciously feeling might have been a price current
—but which you could see was proffered as an excuse
me, without speaking, an open document, which
bore the marks of having been carried in the greasy
lining of a hat, I always felt safe in giving him a
quarter and dismissing him without further questioning.
I always noticed that these circular letters,
when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for
their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy,
and that they all seemed to have been written
by the same hand. Perhaps indigence exercises a
peculiar and equal effect upon the handwriting.
I recall a few occasional mendicants whose faces
were less familiar. One afternoon a most extraordinary
Irishman, with a black eye, a bruised hat, and
other traces of past enjoyment, waited upon me with
a pitiful story of destitution and want, and concluded
by requesting the usual trifle. I replied, with some
severity, that if I gave him a dime he would probably
spend it for drink. “Be Gorra! but you're
roight—I wad that!” he answered promptly. I was
so much taken aback by this unexpected exhibition
of frankness that I instantly handed over the dime.
It seems that Truth had survived the wreck of his
other virtues; he did get drunk, and, impelled by a
like conscientious sense of duty, exhibited himself to
me in that state, a few hours after, to show that my
bounty had not been misapplied.
In spite of the peculiar characters of these reminiscences,
I cannot help feeling a certain regret at the
decay of Professional Mendicancy. Perhaps it may
be owing to a lingering trace of that youthful superstition
fairy, and invested their calling with a mysterious
awe. Perhaps it may be from a belief that there is
something in the old-fashioned alms-givings and actual
contact with misery, that is wholesome for both
donor and recipient, and that any system which interposes
a third party between them is only putting
on a thick glove, which, while it preserves us from
contagion, absorbs and deadens the kindly pressure of
our hand. It is a very pleasant thing to purchase relief
from annoyance and trouble of having to weigh
the claims of an afflicted neighbor. As I turn over
these printed tickets, which the courtesy of San
Francisco Benevolent Association has—by a slight
stretch of the imagination in supposing that any
sane unfortunate might rashly seek relief from a
newspaper office—conveyed to these editorial hands,
I cannot help wondering whether, when in our
last extremity we come to draw upon the Immeasurable
Bounty, it will be necessary to present a ticket.
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