Chapter 38 - Page 2

array of
misery could be furnished by any town in the world.

Every variety of want and suffering here met the eye, and every vice
showed here its victims. Nor were the marvelous and almost incredible
shifts and stratagems of the professional beggars, wanting to finish
this picture of all that is dishonorable to civilization and humanity.

Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow starving and age; young
girls, incurably sick, who ought to have been in the hospital; sturdy
men, with the gallows in their eyes, and a whining lie in their mouths;
young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit; and puny mothers, holding up puny
babes in the glare of the sun, formed the main features of the scene.

But these were diversified by instances of peculiar suffering, vice, or
art in attracting charity, which, to me at least, who had never seen
such things before, seemed to the last degree uncommon and monstrous.

I remember one cripple, a young man rather decently clad, who sat
huddled up against the wall, holding a painted board on his knees. It
was a picture intending to represent the man himself caught in the
machinery of some factory, and whirled about among spindles and cogs,
with his limbs mangled and bloody. This person said nothing, but sat
silently exhibiting his board. Next him, leaning upright against the
wall, was a tall, pallid man, with a white bandage round his brow, and
his face cadaverous as a corpse. He, too, said nothing; but with one
finger silently pointed down to the square of flagging at his feet,
which was nicely swept, and stained blue, and bore this inscription in
chalk:--

"I have had no food for three days;
My wife and children are dying."

Further on lay a man with one sleeve of his ragged coat removed, showing
an unsightly sore; and above it a label with some writing.

In some places, for the distance of many rods, the whole line of
flagging immediately at the base of the wall, would be completely
covered with inscriptions, the beggars standing over them in silence.

But as you passed along these horrible records, in an hour's time
destined to be obliterated by the feet of thousands and thousands of
wayfarers, you were not left unassailed by the clamorous petitions of
the more urgent applicants for charity. They beset you on every hand;
catching you by the coat; hanging on, and following you along; and, for
Heaven's sake, and for God's sake, and for Christ's sake, beseeching of
you but one ha'penny. If you so much as glanced your eye on one of them,
even for an instant, it was perceived like lightning, and the person
never left your side until you turned into another street, or satisfied
his demands. Thus, at least, it was with the sailors; though I