Adventures in Indigence and Other Essays

Both Stevenson and Lamb, writing of "Beggars," fall into what I take to be a grave misapprehension. They both write a defense, and constitute themselves advocates. Lamb brilliantly solicits our pity for these "pensioners on our bounty"; Stevenson, though he characteristically makes himself comrade and brother of his client, and presents the "humbuggery" of the accused as a legitimate art, nevertheless thinks himself but too evidently of a higher order, and the better gentleman of the two. Here, and it would seem in spite of himself, are patronage and condescension.

I own that such an attitude shocks me and makes me apprehensive. Were I superstitious, of a certain creed, I should cross myself to ward off calamity; or were I a Greek of the ancient times, I should certainly pour a propitiatory libation to Hermes, god of wayfarers, thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and the like.

"Poor wretches," indeed! "Pensioners," they! "Ragamuffins! humbugs!" They, with their occult powers! They, mind you, needing our advocacy! I could indeed bear a different testimony.

I think I began first to know the power of the poor, and to fall under their sway, when I was certainly not more than six years old. It must have been about then that I was learning to sew. This seems to have been a profession to which I was so temperamentally disinclined that my mother, to sweeten the task, was wont during the performance of it to read to me. While I sat on a hassock at her feet scooping an unwilling perpendicular needle in and out of difficult hems, my mother would read from one of many little chap-books and children's tracts, which were kept commonly in a flat wicker darning-basket in her wardrobe; little paper books held over from her own and her mother's childhood. They were illustrated with quaint woodcuts, and the covers of them were colored. I was allowed to choose which one was to be read.

One day—"because the time was ripe," I suppose—I selected a little petunia-colored one, outwardly very pleasing to my fancy. It contained the story and the pictures of a miserable beggar and a haughty and unfeeling little girl. He was in rags, and reclined, from feebleness I fancy, on the pavement; she walked proudly in a full-skirted dress, strapped slippers, and pantalets. She wore a dipping leghorn with streamers. Just over this she carried a most proud parasol; just under it a nose aristocratically, it may even be said unduly, high in the air.

I think I need not dwell on the tale, save to say that it was one of the genus known as "moral." There was only one ending possible to the story: the triumph of humility, the downfall of pride and prosperity; swift and awful retribution falling upon her of the leghorn and pantalets. I believe they allowed her in the last picture a pallet of straw, a ragged petticoat, bare feet, clasped hands, and a prayerful reconciliation with her Maker. The story was rendered distinctly poignant for me by the fact that I possessed a parasol of pink "pinked silk," which was held on Sundays and certain other occasions proudly—it also—over a leghorn with streamers which dipped back and front exactly as did the little girl's in the story. But never, never,—once I had made the acquaintance of that story,—was my nose carried haughtily under it, when by chance I sighted one of that race so numerous and so ancient, so well known and so little known to us all. From that day I began to know the power of the poor.