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 appeal, so
personal in its artful suggestions, that it would end in the Association
instantly transferring her to my hands.
My next familiar mendicant was a vender 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 exciting mental pabulum being
probably ascribed to charitable motives. She was finally absorbed by the
S. F. B. A., who have probably made a proper disposition of her effects.
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