ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE (continued 2)

Remembering the Borgias, I should have been loath to taste it; but Augusta bit into it with immediate Christian forgiveness. Yet late that afternoon the wind had shifted again into the old quarter. Happening to go into the woodshed, I found Augusta there crying.

"What in the world is the matter, Augusta?" I asked.

"I'm crying," she said, anticipating Shaw and Androcles, "because I'm a Christian and I can't strike her!"

She raised her old bloodshot eyes, not to me, but to heaven. I have seen the same look in the eyes of an old dog teased by a pert mongrel, and crippled and rendered helpless by rheumatism as was Augusta by her Christianity.

It was Margaret herself at last, who announced that she would be obliged to leave me. She spoke with a dignity which she had held over, I suppose, from regal years submerged but not forgotten.

"It's I will have to be goin'; I've stayed as long as I can. I've stood a great deal,—for ye'll stand a terrible lot for them ye're fond of,—and I've been terrible fond of you, more than of me own—and am to this day. But I can't honest say it's of your deserving! There's a sayin' that we love best them that mistreat us most, and I'm for thinkin' it may be true. I'd have stayed to help you, but I must be havin' some thought of meself! Though you've treated me as I wouldn't treat me own,"—this tellingly,—"and asked me to live under the roof with one of them the Lord has abandoned, yet I've a kindly feelin' in me heart still for ye, and if ye were in need and ye'd come to me, maybe I wouldn't say ye nay—I don't know. I'm a forgivin' disposition, more than is for me own good, God knows! I've hated yer enemies and doomed them to desthruction!"

I patted her hand good-bye between two perfectly well-balanced desires to laugh and to cry. She was so funny, so incredible, so bent, since the foundation of the world, on proving herself right and everybody else wrong. She was not Margaret, merely, whom chance and trouble had brought into my path—she was a very piece of humanity, decked out in unaccustomed bonnet and unlikely feather, best petticoat and a grand pair of black kid gloves—humanity, the ancient, the amusing, the faulty, the incredible, the pathetic, the endeared. And it was as that that she rode away in the funny old jolting farm wagon, her chin in the air, her eyes glancing around haughtily, scanning the old place she had loved and clung to, but scanning it scornfully now, as if she had never laid eyes on it before, and were saying, "Ye puir thing!—with yer air of delapidation! Who—God save us—are you?"

I went back into the kitchen and caught Augusta wiping her eyes with her apron, and was not altogether gay myself—while Margaret jolted away fiercely, our two scalps at her belt.

"You mustn't worry too much about her, ma'am," said Augusta soothingly; "the Lord is her friend, and He'll take care of her."

From incontrovertible precedent I felt sure that He would, with a sureness I had never had as to my own less considerable destiny.

All this was some years ago. By a curious chance,—which has the air of being something more considerable,—it was while I was writing these very paragraphs about Margaret that I had a letter from her, the first since she rode away. It was very characteristic, written in a scrawly and benevolent hand:—

"Will you please let me hear, ma'am, whether you're dead or alive. I've had you on my mind, and for six weeks I can't sleep night or day for thinking of you.

"Your old servant, "Margaret."

Let no one tell me that this is mere coincidence. New proof it is, to one who has long dealt with the poor, of strange powers of which they are possessed. Here is a sister, I tell you,—"plainer nor your eyes,"—to the old blind man, who used to come tap-tap, tap-tapping up the shadowy stairs and into the nursery for the penny I had withheld.

Margaret had come back also. Useless to suppose that I could hide from her in the silence and shadows of the intervening years. She had with her shrewd eye found me out. She had come, like the blind man, not to exact money of me, no; but like a witch disembodied, and through the mail, she had come to levy a more precious tax—to collect as of old the old sympathetic affection; the old toll I had paid her so often before; the tribute she had demanded and received times without number—not for labors rendered, no, nor for accountable values received, but rather by a kind of royal prerogative. Indeed, I take it to be a thing proved, to which this is but slight additional testimony, that these are, how much more than kings,—and it would seem by the grace of God,—sovereigns and rulers over us.

But there is still further testimony, of another order, which I feel called on to bear.

VII MARGHARETTA

When we first went to live in the country, in the old house of which I have written, we had a sufficiently large task merely to make the house itself livable. But as time went on, we attempted to do a very little farming.

How greatly did this broaden and extend my experience as to the poor! There were the boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, these were those whose condition needed improving) to do work on the farm for the summers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long and elaborate prayers should have been at least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so practised in picking locks and purloining that it was sheer waste of genius to place him in a home like ours, where jewelry and other returns for his skill were so slender. He did the best he could with the circumstances, but how meagre they were, after all!

There was the little girl, too, who could dance and recite and sing ragtime, having done so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight in the house. And there was the young Apollo, who at the least could have shepherded the sheep of Admetus; we had no sheep—only one cow.

Then there was Ernest, capable of really heroic devotion. How far did our possibilities fall short of his gifts! I did not engage him—he engaged me. I was setting out the disadvantages as usual, when he blurted out generously, "I like you, and I am going to take this position!" He was blond, German, of the perfectly good-natured type, and of heroic proportions. But, like the ancient heroes of his race, he was fond of the cup that both cheers and inebriates. I used to remonstrate with him and received always one answer, given stubbornly: "You know I'd jump in the river for you!"

I tried my best to show him that what was desirable was, not that he should fling himself into the river, only that he should refrain from the cup! Useless, useless! He wanted a more royal opportunity. To be sober, trustworthy, honorable, daily dependable—these were too trifling! Give him something worthy of his powers! The unlikely and surprising were pleasing to his temperament. He would how generously neglect his work to bring home from the field rabbits, which he shot with an old muzzle-loader, requiring days of toil before it could be got to work at all. Once he produced a pheasant. Lacking the Nemean lion, he butchered a pig, and smoked the pork for me, by an incredibly laborious method, under two barrels, one on top of the other. He hewed down trees with terrible strokes, and built me with Herculean effort a corn-crib of gigantic size to hold a handful of corn he had raised.

All these things, while I appreciated them, left his grave fault uncorrected. But to rebuke him on this score was to quarrel with Hercules for some trifling mistake in his spinning. "You know I would jump in the river for you!" he would reiterate.

There really is something ample in their conceptions of life which goes beyond our small bickerings as to honor and honesty. There is a largeness about them which makes our code look small indeed.

After Ernest's departure, another came for a few months, who had surprising resources. He made a practice of bringing me gifts from I do not know where—strawberries, asparagus, and other delicacies, given him presumably, and for the most part, by gardeners of gentlemen's estates in the outlying land—"friends of his."

I suggested, with misgivings as to ethics, that I ought to pay for these things; but he smiled benevolently, as a king on a subject, and with a manner as bounteous. I had the impression that the world was his.

In the face of his generosities, I felt my behaviors to be feeble and inadequate. These were bounties of a kind to which I was unaccustomed and parvenu, I who had none of the ancient quarterings which would have entitled me to such gratuities; I who had been brought up to the deplorably plebeian idea that one must pay for what one takes.

These are occasions, when, frankly, I am at a loss how to deport myself. I do not know the behaviors befitting. My etiquette does not go so far; and Chesterfield, who covers so many points, stops short of this: he says nothing on the subject.

Oh, royal ways! Oh, fine prerogatives! What hope have I, who am but descended from the founders of a mere country, from men who fought and poured out their blood rather than pay for what they did not receive—what hope is there that I shall ever attain to that gracious and lordly company which receives, as a right, that for which it does not pay!

I have named but a few of these princely characters and their deportments; but remembering them all and weighing all their values, I believe that "the brightest jewel in my crown wad" still be—Margharetta.

I have never been entirely certain that Margharetta was not descended from the Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, and was a poet. "I will show you some of his poetry," she promised me in the first five minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some of my friends say he is as great a poet as Shakespeare."

Like Marie Antoinette, she had three children. Her husband's misfortune had made it necessary to put these under the care of others. She talked of them incessantly, and assured me that no heart could bleed like a mother's.

As we drove up from the station, she looked all about her, with the air of a Siddons.

"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" she remarked, still very grand, but almost awed, it seemed. "She's such a poetic child!" (Ethel was the oldest, a little girl of ten.) "And these trees!" she said solemnly, as we entered the grave lordly shadows of the hemlocks. "Wouldn't Richard enjoy them, now!" (Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.)

When we at last got to the house, and she entered the kitchen in her grand manner, it seemed to grow large—as the lintels and chambers of the Greeks are said to have done when the gods visited them. The walls seemed to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on a shining stateliness. I have difficulty when writing of her to keep myself to fact, so gracious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for instance, that her dresses all dipped a little at the back, yet I have the greatest temptation to say she wore a court train, so much was that the enlarging impression that she at all times conveyed. She was the most dominating personality, I believe, that I have ever known. Like a French verb, she seemed to cover and account for all possibilities. She reminded you of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, the indicative, the plus-que-parfait. Entering the dining-room, her handsome hands bearing—always a little aloft—the corned beef or pot roast that should have been a peacock at the very least, she conveyed, silently, time and tense and person, passive and active: "I am"; "let us love"; "let us have"; "thou hast"; "I have not"; "if I had!"

Early in her career, I asked her what desserts she could make.

She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. She had no need to lift her head: it was constitutionally, structurally high.

"I can't make any," she said, with firmness and finality. "We bought all our desserts at the delicatessen."

So, without anger, only with dignity, she managed to put me in my place.

Added to the many unconscious appeals that Margharetta was forever making to me, she finally made a direct one. Informing me once more that no heart could bleed like a mother's, she begged to be allowed to have, if it were only one of her children with her, the little girl aged ten. I consented, and went myself to fetch her.

She was a beautiful child. She had a great deal of Margharetta's own handsome, insolent beauty, but she had in addition a craft and ability for lying and deception astounding in one so young. Ten years old by the calendar she no doubt was; but by sundry other reckonings, she might have been ten thousand—a strange, pathetic, puzzling little girl.

For a time Margharetta's heart was staunched. But ere long it began to bleed afresh for the one who was, it was now clear, her dearest—Richard, the little Dauphin. She would stand looking out of the window, the picture of wretchedness. "He is such an angelic little fellow! I can't begin to tell you! Oh, if I could only see him! If I could only have him in my arms once more!"

I make no apology. I only tell the event, perhaps a little shamefacedly. It was not long after this that I went and fetched Richard also.

If his sister was ten thousand, Richard was, I think, of prehistoric origin. He had carried over from the Stone Age a strange ability for having his own way at heavy cost. He had never been in the country. His passion for flowers would have been a hopeful and poetic thing, had it but been accompanied by a knowledge of what flowers were. He would appear in full rapture, bearing a huge bouquet of young bean-plants or a large nosegay of freshly planted cabbages. Never, despite my faithful efforts, did he lose his passionate love of flowers, and never, despite my equally faithful endeavors, did he learn to know what flowers were. I think that they were to him anything that could be gathered with greatest ease in largest bunches. With this definition in mind, it will be seen that a vegetable garden offers superlative opportunities.

Margharetta could see in all this nothing but a newly interesting phase of her darling. I was there when he brought her his third generous bouquet. She took it into her gracious handsome hands, held it off a little, then appealed to me for appreciation:—

"Now, isn't that his mother's boy? He brings everything to me."

I had explained to Margharetta before, that, right as filial affection undoubtedly is, the gathering of young tomato-plants from the garden had come to be fearfully wrong. I now repeated this severely, then addressed the Dauphin direct.

"You are never, never to gather anything from the garden again; do you understand?"

Back went the Dauphin's head suddenly; his face became a purple mask of tragedy; his eyes rained intolerable tears; he broke forth into a most wild and tragic wail.

Margharetta stooped, gathered him to her bosom with one of her finest gestures, lifted him sobbing in her arms, laid his head against her shoulder, held it there with a possessive queenly hand, and with a colder look thrown at me, I am sure, than ever the Bourbons threw at the mob, carried him upstairs.

Later she explained to me haughtily what the Dauphin had meanwhile explained to her—he had been told to gather those plants.

"Told to gather them?"

"Yes. Come, lamb, tell just what Tony said to you."

"Tony said," began Richard, a little breathless, but resolved, and twisting and braiding his fingers as he spoke, "Tony said, 'You can have all the flowers you want, every day, and I think your mother would like the tomato-plants best.'"

This sudden opera-bouffe turn of affairs really took me off my feet. When I suggested that it was quite certain that Tony would contradict Richard's statement, Margharetta's reply was perfectly consistent. Did I suppose she would take the word of "a no-account Eye-talian" against that of her darling?

So I found myself once more face to face with that total disregard of fact and probabilities which I had now come to know as one of the leading characteristics of her class. It was for me to remember that miracle waits upon them; that nothing is improbable to them if it but coincide with their desires; that truth shall not serve them unless it goes dressed in their livery. Nothing could be done about the matter. We were at a deadlock. What were mere logic and reason? What are they ever, in the face of a faith chosen and adhered to?

Margharetta stood firm in an unshaken faith in her own, while I departed, to wonder why it is that humanity deports itself as decently as it does, with these dark powers, not only at work in it, but hugely at work in it, all the while.

The days went on. In the course of becoming acquainted with the country, the little Princess and the Dauphin underwent, of course, many tragic adventures. Though they had me so well in command that I ran to do their bidding, or flew to their rescue, at a mere summoning shriek, wind, water, fire, cats, dogs, cows, horses, poison ivy, snapping turtles, and sundry other folk were not so biddable.

This recalcitrancy led to tragedies innumerable. When either or both children were hurt by some fact or reality which by mere royal habit they had haughtily ignored, and when they were beaten in the fray and wounded, Margharetta was as one bereft of her senses. Panic seized her. She flung herself upon my mercy and my intelligence. She wrung her hands. She was distraught. She could do nothing herself for her darlings, but was wild with gratitude, and watched with tragic animal eyes everything that I was able to do for them. How wonderful I was at such moments! How could she ever thank me! Then from my ministrations she would receive into her arms the battered Princess or dilapidated Dauphin, as it might have been from the hands of a relented Providence.

My own glory lasted only during the danger, however. Her darlings secure, she was not long in reascending her throne, and continued to behave with entire consistency as to her probable ancestry. She was the only real queen, with all a queen's regality and insolence, that I have ever dealt with. It is clear to me now that I was hypnotized by her manner to think it a privilege to be of use to her in the calamities of herself and her family. It is true I did at last make a fearful revolutionary stand for liberty, and bundled her and the young Princess of ten and ten thousand and the little prehistoric Dauphin off one day, and began as best I could to reconstruct life; but not before I had come fearfully near, in the Versailles manner in which Margharetta had conducted herself and our kitchen, being a "condition" myself.

It is now five years ago, "of a sunny morning," since they left us, and the post brought me the other day a short letter from Margharetta enclosing a "poem" by her husband, on the death of the little girl. She "wanted me to know." I feel quite sure that the letter was divided between sorrow for her loss and pride in her husband's performance.

The circumstance touched me more than I would have supposed possible. I thought of course of a mother's "bleeding heart." Poor Margharetta, for all her queenliness and all her disregard of fact, brought at last with the humblest of us to face the one supreme reality; and weaving as best she could some fancy about that, too, and turning away her face from it toward some consolation of reunion which (the verses promised this) was to be given her in another life, and, I doubt not, also toward the pride in this life of being wedded to a man (let us waive the matter of the jail) who could write poetry, and was, some thought, "as great as Shakespeare."

VIII THE POWERS OF THE POOR

That the poor have strange, one might almost say occult, powers, seems to me proved. The downtrodden with whom I dealt were, so far as I could judge, the very pies and daws of existence, who, one might reasonably suppose, would be grateful for whatever hips and haws and other chance berries the bleak winter of their calamities left them. Nothing could be further from the truth. They lived, rather, it would seem, on canary seed and millet, maize and sesame, not obtainable in the open markets of the world. I fell under the strange delusion that they were to labor for me, and that, for a wage agreed upon, they were to relieve me of care. Again, how wide of the mark was this! They expected to be looked after like queen bees, and they were! I myself laboring from flower to flower for them, and filling their cells with honey.

You may think them as stupid as you like, and as inconsiderable. Deal with them but long enough, and you shall have strange suspicions. You shall begin to note a growing and undeniable likeness in these to "Cinderella" and "The Youngest Brother." Nor are these fairy tales, mind you, safe and unbelievable, shut up there in your Grimm and Andersen on the shelf, to be taken down only at pleasure; no, but fairy tales potent and indisputable, hoeing your potatoes, walking about in the flesh in your kitchen, and hanging out your clothes of a Monday.

There is, indeed, some royalty about this class that bodes as ill for us to ignore, as it is alarming for us to contemplate. If the Lord be for them,—and there is every reason, historical and romantical, to suppose that He is,—who then can be against them? Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, but these can never be lowered! These, I take it, are in their own manner imperial spirits, let kings and royal successions be what they may. Here, without cabinets or ministers, or executive or administrative cares to weigh upon them, yet with what authority they go clothed!

It is astounding, if one only becomes poor enough,—I say it in all soberness and sincerity,—how rich and powerful one may become. And perhaps just here it is my duty to submit a testimony I have up to this time withheld. I have said that I myself have been poor, but I have as yet said nothing of the strange unlooked-for loftiness that this circumstance lent me. While I was of the wealthy, I strongly maintained that these, and what we are wont to call the "upper classes," have the very considerable advantage, and believed it with all my heart. But no sooner was I downright poor, uncertain even where the next meals were to come from, than the potion, the charm, the necromancy, the delusion, or the truth,—have it which you will!—began to work, and I myself to have a subtle suspicion, and at last a positive sense, of superiority.

The wealthy, the advantageous began to dwindle in my eyes. How poor they were in real experience, in sympathy, in understanding; how wanting in fine feeling; how destitute, for the most part, of that only wealth worth acquiring,—wealth of the heart!—whereas, the poorer I was, the greater the wealth of understanding that was mine; as my moneys dwindled, I was made rich of the universe; a new sense of love and bounty was given me as by an unlooked-for legacy. The vast tired multitude going home at night, all these suddenly were my own—my brothers and my sisters; further, it may be noted, I acquired the wealthy also. These too became my brothers, more chill and starved sometimes (I knew this now) in their luxuries than the "poor" in their destitution. Could one, indeed, knowing any of the real values, feel a bitterness toward such? or could one fail to experience, having known any of the true humilities of life, a love for these also?

Let it sound as paradoxical as it may,—I do not say it unadvisedly,—poverty is an enrichment, and often enough a grandeur. Here, indeed, in this fact—I think it by no means unlikely—may lie the explanation of many a humorously high behavior and lordliness in those of whom I have more particularly told. If this be truth, as I take it to be, then it lends consistency, even if a little quaint, to what threatened to seem but unwarrantable chaos.

Is it not probable, remembering my own experience, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, and the others had with their very indigence acquired a compensating fortune and, by reason of their very destitution, inherited, as by lofty bequest, the universe? It should not be forgotten, moreover, that I had come to these distinctions only after years of comfortable living, whereas those I have told you of had been born to the purple of their poverty. I, in serving others, have never yet been able to give myself the ample airs of a Margharetta. I have never found it possible to pull pennies out of people's pockets by the Æschylean tragedy of my condition, or to draw pity at will out of their hearts. I am smitten with silence when trouble and difficulty assail me, and I have an intolerable instinct against asking for the sympathy and commiseration of others; whereas those better accustomed than myself,—as I have shown you,—how readily are they able to requisition your sympathy, to appropriate wholly your pity, and to confiscate your possessions, your theories, and your ethics!

Yet we, mind you, in the face of these abilities, have assumed them to be our inferiors, and have organized for them frankly a society for the improvement of their condition! That we can mitigate their sufferings and inconveniences, lessen their cold or their hunger, I willingly admit; but I am not of so bold an intellect as to believe that we can improve their condition, or that their condition, take it for all in all, can be improved upon.

If you doubt such testimony as I have borne, and think it too personal, there is other more general and considerable. Were not Egypt and all her power despised and triumphed over by "a colony of revolted Egyptian slaves"? Did not proud Rome go down, also, to a like downtrodden people? Picture what Rome was in her might—Rome tracing her ancestry to the gods! And then look upon her bowed down in slavish subserviency to kiss the shoe of a poor fisherman!

And the poor then, who called themselves Christians—as now you would have called them underlings, menials, subalterns. Yes, and so they were. And they lived precariously in caves and catacombs under the surveillance of the emperor's guards, as our most scurvy poor under the police. Yet see them to-day, with dominion over palm and pine, and with control of the earth's continents. And where now are the Roman emperors?

History teems with such instances. With what scorn do you suppose the mighty Persians in their glittering armor might have looked upon those few youths who in the dawn "sat combing their long hair for death" before Marathon? When the nameless poor murmured outside the gates of Versailles, what would any of us have given for the brief lineage or trumpery royalty of a Marie or a Louis? It would not have sold for a franc to any one with a head for business. Even as these poor people shook the gates, almost the haughtiest queen of history was already on her way, then, and at their bidding, to become the Widow Capet. And that, too, for only a little while, and by sufferance, before they hurried her on to the last level of all.

There may seem to be about them at first a marked futility. Only wait, and you shall see what a power they have! Is there need that they should pique or plume themselves or strut? They have no need to cut a dash. The herald's office could add nothing to their stature. Here is no newness or recency, no innovation; here rather are tradition, custom, something time-honored, however little you may think it venerable. Here is immemorial usage, "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary."

And have these continued in the world in predominating numbers, despite misfortune, calamity, catastrophe? No; mind you, rather because of these! Think of a race with that ability! Since Cain fell into misfortune and was shielded of the Almighty, and Lazarus, for a like reason, lacked not a divine advocate, have these not had the special protection of God? Can you show me any people of lands and property, of thrift and saving habits, of full granaries and honest provident stores laid by, who were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night? who had manna and quail supplied them; and an entire land swept clean of its rightful owners by the Lord's hand, so that they might come into it instead, to enjoy the wells they had not digged, and the fruits thereof which neither had they planted?

Were it not of too great a bulk, the testimony of literature could be brought to corroborate that of history. When you read "The Jolly Beggars," you are informed without squeamishness which is the most free and powerful class in the world; and when you have read that other document by the same hand, "The Twa Dogs," you have perused a fine bit of testimony as to which is the happiest. Or if there lacked these, and there were left us but Arden and its gentle beggars—who could be in doubt? How they triumph over the rich and the successful and lord it felicitously in their poverty! What would you look to find these but broken and saddened—these who are not only beggars, mind you, but wronged men: the Duke, Orlando, Rosalind, all suffering injustice; Adam starving; Touchstone, Jaques, Amiens, and for the most part all of them, too well acquainted with the rudeness of the world; men who had known but too well the unkindness of man's ingratitude, the feigning of most friendship, the bitterness of benefits forgot. And yet, turn only to that first scene in the forest. If ever I set eyes on independent gentlemen, here they are! And who doubts too, reading of these, that Shakespeare wrote of them out of his own Arden, out of the enrichment of his own poverty, and the splendors of his unsuccessful years!

The powers of the poor! This is a matter to which I have often lent my speculation, and have striven to perceive by what rights, as of gods in exile, they have maintained their dignity and their supremacy; and I have wondered whether one of these may not be that necessity laid upon them to touch more nearly than we the realities of life. We have set guards at our gateways, to turn away Poverty or Misery or Cold or Hunger, yes, and Human Brotherhood and Life and Death themselves. Death, it is true, and some others, will not be altogether gainsaid, but enter at last into the lives of all of us, bringing invariably—this is to be noted—a great dignity to the house which they have visited. But to the poor the "heavenly powers" come, whether welcome or no, and like the gods visiting mortals, they do not depart, save from the entirely unworthy, without bestowing enrichment.

I have sat at the table of an old Philemon and Baucis, whose condition of poverty appeared not to be bettered by their entertainment of the great realities of life; whose pitcher poured as scant as ever it did, though Death and Calamity had but lately visited them. But when you thirsted for a better draught, a draught not to sustain the body, but the spirit—then, then the miracle was evident enough! They filled your cup to its trembling brim, nor, pour as they would, could they empty their hearts of love and understanding.

These are, indeed, good gifts, and of the gods, and there are many others; and it would take little to prove how much more bountifully the poor receive of them than the wealthier classes.

Another possession, which I have noted often among the poor, is that gayety, that lightness of heart, that almost inconsequent gayety, so often seen, amazingly, among them. Where you and I might be crushed by calamity, they can raise their heads and be glad, and that over some trifle. Where you might have gone sad and sober for weeks, Mamie could dance her little ragtime songs; Margaret could be gay with the pig; and Margharetta, fresh from a new downfall, could gather the children of her heart to her as a hen its chickens, and in blissful content think nothing of the morrow. This I have seen again and again. They are as recuperative as King David. Let them sin and blunder and suffer and be cast down, it is but for a brief season; soon you shall hear the plucking of their harp and the sound of their psaltery, and a new song unto the Lord.

As further testimony, this is, I believe, the place to confess that it was not in the days of my prosperity and happiness, but in the days of my poverty and sorrow, that I myself became possessed of this good gift of the gods. The laughter and gayety of heart of prosperous years, though they may be of no mean order, seem to me but pallid things compared with those of a more tested season. To have seen the total wreckage of one's hopes, to have known despair and the bleak winds of the heath of the world, and to delight still, and more than ever, in the little and the gay, and to taste with a keener relish than ever before the fine-flavored humor of the world, this is to be rich, though one were in tatters; this is to be gifted, though to the last farthing one has been robbed.

But there is another endowment besides all these, even more precious—I mean that unconscious grace and dignity of spirit possessed by some of the poor; I mean that quiet and gracious acceptance of a lot which, to our reckoning, seems but bare and difficult; that gentle and persistent kindliness of men and women toward a world which, it seems to us, has so roughly and despitefully used them.

This I take to be the greatest of the gifts that the gods confer upon the poor; and being so, it is fitting that it should not be indiscriminately bestowed. You shall not meet it commonly or often; yet here or there will be found some true ruler of his kind, looking out on the world with this kindly and gracious spirit. I have known some few such myself, and one notably; though my acquaintance with him was but of short duration, yet it summed up for me and made whole the fragmentary virtues of the poor, and set a lasting seal upon my love and understanding of them.

IX HORATIO

I saw him first selling papers by a subway entrance. The day was cold, and he had that peculiarly pinched look of those who are both ill-nourished and ill-clad; and yet you could not without presumption have called him pitiful. There was a kind of simple grandeur about him which I am at a loss adequately to describe: a thing rather to be embodied in myth and legend.

The "envy of the gods" has been variously set out in tale and story. Prometheus defying divinity is a moving enough figure, hurling curses back at his superior, and visited by Asia, Panthea, and the nymphs and Oceanides. But it would need a new legend, it seems to me, to embody that loftiness which, in a similar bondage, hurls no curses, breathes no complaint, nor asks even to be spared, if that be possible; a gentleness which, without the least leaning to humility, preserves a generous outlook, triumphant in its persistent kindliness as Prometheus in his unconquered might; unbroken, unlowered; bound, yet attaining somehow to a continued generosity and bestowal.

It might seem, by the look of this man, that Fate had come to hate one she could so little bend; for not only was he ragged and pinched, but there was about his delicate face and the great slenderness of the body, only too certainly, the mark of some physical ravage, and of an overborne endurance. To the casual observer, he was but a man selling newspapers at the entrance to the subway; to those of thoughtful and speculative observation, he was a man standing within a few feet of his grave, and likely at almost any moment to feel on his shoulder, or dimly on his chilly hand, the summoning touch of Hermes, Leader of Souls.

There was about him a most amiable patience and courtesy which had not at all the color of resignation. Indeed, to speak of resignation in his case would have been to impute to him riches and hopes he had not. I can give you no idea how much more courteous he seemed than his destiny. The only Asia who ever visited him, I am sure, was a woman, fat and comfortable looking, who sold papers also, at the other end of the subway entrance, behind the shelter of its glass. She used to come over sometimes while I was buying my paper of him, to ask him to make change, blowing on her hands in a wholesome manner, or beating her arms like a cabby. That she never sympathized with him, I felt sure, not alone because of the general look and contour of her, but because—as I have tried to show you—he was not the man to whom one would presume to tender sympathy.

As I came to know him better, I began to take the keenest pleasure in his smile, which was always ready. He never let the salutation go at a mere "good-morning." To my banal "Pretty cold to-day!" he would reply smiling, and even while turning his shoulder to receive the cut of the wind less directly, "Yes, but bracing"; or, while his blue fingers fumbled for change, "Not quite so cold as yesterday"; or it was, "Well, the children like snow for Christmas"; or, "This snow will give work to the poor, cleaning the streets"; or, if the white flakes turned to threads of rain, "This will save the city a great deal."

There never was any bravado in this, only the incomparable gentleness and the winning smile. If Fate lingered about, malicious, hoping to hear him at last complain, she might as well have given over her eavesdropping. I, going to him for the daily "Times," and not infrequently with a tired spirit and a heavy heart, would find that, in return for my penny, he had given me, not only the morning paper, but a new courage, or a heartening and precious shame of my own discouragement, or, oftener still, a new faith in the world. So it was that he stood there, day after day, in the freezing weather, dispensing these benefits, a peculiar and moving royalty legible in his person.

If those who read of him here pity him, it can only be because my words give but such a poor idea of his great dignity. Those who saw him with a clear eye, could they pity him, do you think? And I—I who had cried out more than once, under how much less provocation, against the duress of fortune—was it my right to give him commiseration? Marry, heaven forbid! Again and again, as I went from him, my mind suggested, rather, noble likenesses, and sought to find some simile to match him. Once it was, "The gods go in low disguises"; again, "Great spirits now on earth are sojourning"; and once the words of Amiens, addressed to the Duke, seemed to me to blend in with his behaviors:—

And again, I thought once that the royal Dane, addressing Horatio, offered me words befitting:—

One day I bought him a pair of woolen gloves, and all the way to his corner I kept rehearsing an absurd speech of presentation, designed to relieve both him and me of embarrassment. He must not know that I had bought them for him! I wanted to spare myself that! So I concocted what is currently known as a "cock-and-bull" story; but, as I look back on it and its results, I lean to believing that I never perpetrated a finer bit of fiction. I give it now without shame.

"My husband," said I, fumbling for my penny, "has been very ill—a long while."

"Well, now, I'm sorry!" said Horatio gravely, and without the least wonder, apparently, why this should have been proffered.

"And the doctors think," I stumbled on, digging in my purse, "there's no likelihood in the world at all he will be out of his bed before the summer."

"Ah, that's very hard for a man if he's active," said Horatio, speaking with full sympathy, as of one who knew.

"And so," said I, putting my penny in his hand, taking the "Times," and mentally beshrewing me the clumsiness of language, "and so, you see,"—here I brought them forth,—"there's a pair of gloves of his he won't have even the chance to wear; and they're almost as good as new, and—I just thought—may be—"

Here words deserted me. I appealed directly to his eyes. These were fixed, kind and gray, on the gloves. He was already taking them.

"Indeed, I'd like very much to wear them," he said, "but I'm sorry he can't be wearing them himself. May be he'll be well sooner than you think, though. Sickness is a bad thing. These are very warm,"—this with his delightful smile, and he began drawing one of them on,—"I'm very much obliged. But may be he'll be well sooner than you think. I'm sure I hope so."

It was a busy morning. The early subway was pouring forth its crowds as an early chimney, just started, its smoke. I was glad to mingle and fade among them.

The next morning, he was ready, may be even a little eager, as I approached. He had my paper doubled and waiting for me, and waiting too, his gentle inquiry, "Is he better?"

"Yes," said I, "I think so—a little."

Some one else wanted a paper and we said no more. But each day after that he asked me, and I gave him a cautious, not too enthusiastic report, for my patient must remain indoors till sharp weather and all possible need of gloves were past. So, he was only a little better. I took pains once to add, "A long illness is very discouraging."

"That it is," Horatio assented. "But you'll forget that when he's well."

So we continued in our courtesies and our sympathies; I very pleased and hardly conscience-stricken, to have been able to give him what I knew he must have cherished a good deal more than the gloves, something, indeed, for the warming of his heart—the chance, say rather the right, to extend his so experienced sympathy, and the opportunity to give, to one in need of them, some of the stored-up riches of his spirit. So, his own days growing short, and the shadow of his own cares lengthening, he yet smiled daily, as he gave me of these riches, and wished me a happy sunrise of my hopes and a good-morrow.

One day he was not there. His fine spirit had fared forth. I can still feel the shock and sudden loss it was to me. I went over to Asia, or Panthea, selling her papers, and questioned her. Was he ill?

"He went very sudden, ma'am, I believe. His wife came to say so. I'm selling his papers now. What will you have? The 'Times'?"

Hermes, the kindly, had beckoned him from his "undefeated, undishonored field," and he had gone, eager and gentle there, too, I have no doubt.

It was but a little while that I knew him, but the influence of him abides. He has lent something to life which even the least noble cannot take from it. The sorry old derelict, his poor old red lantern eyes looking out of his dark face, when I give him a dole, receives it, not from me, I think, after all, but from some gentleness which Horatio lends me as a legacy.

He was, of course, supreme of his class; but by that very supremacy he made plain to me many things concerning those less than himself, but of his same lineage. It is by no means unlikely, I think, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, Margharetta, and the rest, so much less worthy than Horatio, yet glimpsed their heritage also, though in some dim adumbrated manner of their own, and were unconsciously affected and aggrandized by it.

Although I have spoken of them throughout with lightness, and have laughed at their amazing follies, yet I know well that there is a solemnity forever attendant upon the poor. There is without doubt some unexpected endowment in suffering and privation, some surprising enrichment in the common lot. Have it as you will, there is no honor so high, or distinction so covetable, as to be a sharer of human joys and sorrows, and an intimate, even though it be in misery and solitude, of the hearts of men; and to this brotherhood, sharing the common lot, the poor undeniably contribute by far the greater numbers.

There is, to the very end, something tinsel and tawdry in the trappings of special privilege. The splendors of the wealthy are but a brief pageant—stage properties, donned for a little while to lend some height and dignity to those of but human stature after all. The beggar who looks on, as did Horatio, at this pageant, without envy, and who, looking on, gives a gentle patronage to the rich, does so not without warrant. The greater splendors and possessions are his own. Let them decorate their stately halls; let them transport, as I have known them to do, entire ceilings from Venetian palaces, tapestries from chambers of those who also, long ago, once were great—the glory of the sun will not be subsidized, the halls of the morning are lit with unmatchable splendors, and the palace chambers of the night are hung by mightier ministrants with tapestries of a finer weave, and ceiled with stars for the mere vagrant and the vagabond who shall sleep some day beneath them, without monument and unremembered.

Do not these know life more nearly? Who has flattered them? Who has shielded them from infancy, from the great powers? Who has defended them? Have not these, like Œdipus and other kings' sons, been exposed upon the very rocks of time; and have they not survived that circumstance? Have these not dealt more intimately with the elements? Who had enabled them to avoid the cut of the winter, or to evade the stroke of the summer? to elude the arrows of sickness that fly by night, or the pestilence that walks in the noonday? Sorrow and Death have dealt with them more nearly, and without ambassadors. They have had audience with reality; they have talked with Life without interpreters.

He who loves this world, and has found it good on such terms, may be allowed his reasonable preference; he who speaks fondly still of life, who has had such communings, may speak with some authority. Horatio's smile was worth the pleasantness and optimism of a thousand who have never made change with blue fingers, or shrunk from the cut of the cold.

There are those who would patronize and pity such as Horatio. It can only be, then, that they know this world but little, and still childishly count riches to be but money, and poverty to be but lack of it.

And if you tell me that none but a sentimentalist would call poverty an enrichment, then I can only assume that you have never been poor; and if you tell me that the high behavior of Horatio is at the best but endurance, even then, could I grant you so much, the argument still would hold. Even so, Horatio endured life with a noble grace, and helped others to do so; even so, he was able still to find pleasure in a fate from which the wealthy would shrink in horror, and lovable traits in one they would have called his bitterest enemy. He had blessed the life which had cursed him, and had loved it though it had despitefully used him.

So he triumphed—yet without pride; nor did one hear in his spirit's victory any hint of animosity, or talk of reprisals, or bitterness, or demand for indemnities, or hidden hate. Rather, he was to be found each day undefeated in his impregnable gentleness, that still unfallen province in which he dwelt. His were some incalculable riches of the spirit which Poverty had heaped up and amassed for him through those years when his fingers handled without complaint the miserable pennies; his was some towering strength under the disguise of the weak and broken body; like that Olympian glory fabled inevitably to appear some time, under the mortal humility of gods in exile. There was about him, for all his slenderness, something grand, something epic, and allegorical. He might have stood as a symbol of a downtrodden people, such nations as the world (be it said to our shame) sees still, and that not in small numbers—crushed, oppressed by the arrogant, the strong, yet still surviving and giving to the other nations their gifts of gay song or heroic endurance, and out of an incredible bounty still bestowing love and kindness and beauty on the world which has behaved toward them without mercy.

Look, if you will, at the beggar nations of the world, and search the heart of the poor among peoples, and I am convinced that you will find in these also corroborative evidence of truths I have tried here to touch upon but lightly. Let be their follies and their mistakes and all their incredible assumptions: who shall declare that poverty has not enriched them likewise? And among them, shall you not find high and royal and single spirits, who, like Horatio, have both known and loved the world and triumphed over it without animosity? To have known and yet to have loved the world! Is not this the real heart of the matter? Is not this the true test after all, and the indisputable mark of a king's son? And shall you not find it oftener among the poor than elsewhere? For he cannot be said to know the world who has never been at its mercy; even as only he can be said to have triumphed over it, who, having suffered all things at its hands, yet loves it with unconquerable fidelity.