window-pane.
In these streets the belted and blue-coated policeman
appears seldom in comparison with the frequency of his
occurrence in more reputable thoroughfares. I used
to think that the inhabitants would have ample time to
murder one another, or any stranger, like myself, who
might violate the filthy sanctities of the place, before the
law could bring up its lumbering assistance. Neverthe-
less, there is a supervision; nor does the watchfulness of
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 265
authority permit the populace to be tempted to any out-
break. Once, in a time of dearth, I noticed a ballad-
singer going through the street hoarsely chanting some
discordant strain in a provincial dialect, of which I could
only make out that it addressed the sensibilities of the
auditors on the score of starvation ; but by his side
stalked the policeman, offering no interference, but
watchful to hear what this rough minstrel said or sang,
and silence him, if his effusion threatened to prove too
soul-stirring. In my judgment, however, there is little
or no danger of that kind : they starve patiently, sicken
patiently, die patiently, not through resignation, but a
diseased flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do mis-
chief to those above them, it will probably be by the
communication of some destructive pestilence ; for, so
the medical men affirm, they suffer all the ordinary
diseases with a degree of virulence elsewhere unknown,
and keep among themselves traditionary plagues that
have long ceased to afflict more fortunate societies.
Charity herself gathers her robe about her to avoid
their contact. It would be a dire revenge, indeed, if
they were to prove their claims to be reckoned of one
blood and nature with the noblest and wealthiest by
compelling them to inhale death through the diffusion
of their own poverty-poisoned atmosphere.
A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has an
unconquerable dislike to poverty and beggary. Beggars
have heretofore been so strange to an American that he
is apt to become their prey, being recognized through
his national peculiarities, and beset by them in the
streets. The English smile at him, and say that there
are ample public arrangements for every pauper's pos-
sible need, that street charity promotes idleness and vice,
and that yonder personification of misery on the pave-
ment will lay up a good day's profit, besides supping
more luxuriously than the dupe who gives him a shill-
ing. By and by the stranger adopts their theory and
begins to practise upon it, much to his own temporary
freedom from annoyance, but not entirely without moral
detriment or sometimes a too late contrition. Years
2 66 OUR OLD HOME
afterwards, it may be, his memory is still haunted by
some vindictive wretch whose cheeks were pale and
hunger-pinched, whose rags fluttered in the east wind,
whose right arm was paralyzed and his left leg shrivelled
into a mere nerveless stick, but whom he passed by
remorselessly because an Englishman chose to say that
the fellow's misery looked too perfect, was too artistically
got up, to be genuine. Even allowing this to be true,
(as, a hundred chances to one, it was,) it would still have
been a clear case of economy to buy him off with a little
loose silver, so that his lamentable figure should not limp
at the heels of your conscience all over the world. To
own the truth, I provided myself with several such
imaginary persecutors in England, and recruited their
number with at least one sickly-looking wretch whose
acquaintance I first made at Assisi, in Italy, and, taking
a dislike to something sinister in his aspect, permitted
him to beg early and late, and all day long, without get-
ting a singe baiocco. At my latest glimpse of him, the
villain avenged himself, not by a volley of horrible
curses, as any other Italian beggar would, but by taking
an expression so grief-stricken, want-wrung, hopeless,
and withal resigned, that I could paint his life-like
portrait at this moment. Were I to go over the same
ground again, I would listen to no man's theories, but
buy the little luxury of beneficence at a cheap rate,
instead of doing myself a moral mischief by exuding
a stony incrustation over whatever natural sensibility I
might possess.
On the other hand, there were some mendicants whose
utmost efforts I even now felicitate myself on having
withstood. Such was a phenomenon abridged of his
lower half, who beset me for two or three years together,
and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members,
had some supernatural method of transporting himself
(simultaneously, I believe) to all quarters of the city.
He wore a sailor's jacket, (possibly, because skirts would
have been a superfluity to his figure,) and had a remark-
ably broad-shouldered and muscular frame, surmounted
by a large, fresh-colored face, which was full of power
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 267
and intelligence. His dress and linen were the perfec-
tion of neatness. Once a day, at least, wherever I went,
I suddenly became aware of this trunk of a man on the
path before me, resting on his base, and looking as if he
had just sprouted out of the pavement, and would sink
into it again and reappear at some other spot the instant
you left him behind. The expression of his eye was
perfectly respectful, but terribly fixed, holding your own
as by fascination, never once winking, never wavering
from its point-blank gaze right into your face, till you
were completely beyond the range of his battery of one
immense rifled cannon. This was his mode of soliciting
alms ; and he reminded me of the old beggar who ap-
pealed so touchingly to the charitable sympathies of Gil
Bias, taking aim at him from the roadside with a long-
barrelled musket. The intentness and directness of his
silent appeal, his close and unrelenting attack upon your
individuality, respectful as it seemed, was the very flower
of insolence ; or, if you give it a possibly truer inter-
pretation, it was the tyrannical effort of a man endowed
with great natural force of character to constrain your
reluctant will to his purpose. Apparently, he had staked
his salvation upon the ultimate success of a daily strug-
gle between himself and me, the triumph of which would
compel me to become a tributary to the hat that lay on
the pavement beside him. Man or fiend, however, there
was a stubbornness in his intended victim which this mas-
sive fragment of a mighty personality had not altogether
reckoned upon, and by its aid I was enabled to pass him
at my customary pace hundreds of times over, quietly
meeting his terribly respectful eye, and allowing him the
fair chance which I felt to be his due, to subjugate me, if
he really had the strength for it. He never succeeded,
but, on the other hand, never gave up the contest ; and
should I ever walk those streets again, I am certain that
the truncated tyrant will sprout up through the pave-
ment and look me fixedly in the eye, and perhaps get
the victory.
I should think all the more highly of myself, if I had
shown equal heroism in resisting another class of beg-
268 OUR OLD HOME
garly depredators, who assailed me on my weaker side
and won an easy spoil. Such was the sanctimonious
clergyman, with his white cravat, who visited me with a
subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in
a case of heart-rending distress; the respectable and
ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy and si-
lent in his own person, but accompanied by a sympathizing
friend, who bore testimony to his integrity, and stated the
unavoidable misfortunes that had crushed him down ;
or the delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had been
bred in affluence, but was suddenly thrown upon the
perilous charities of the world by the death of an indul-
gent, but secretly insolvent father, or the commercial
catastrophe and simultaneous suicide of the best of hus-
bands ; or the gifted, but unsuccessful author, appeal-
ing to my fraternal sympathies, generously rejoicing in
some small prosperities which he was kind enough to
term my own triumphs in the field of letters, and claim-
ing to have largely contributed to them by his unbought
notices in the public journals. England is full of such
people, and a hundred other varieties of peripatetic trick-
sters, higher than these, and lower, who act their parts
tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive
effect. I knew at once, raw Yankee as I was, that they
were humbugs, almost without an exception, rats that
nibble at the honest bread and cheese of the community,
and grow fat by their petty pilf erings, yet often gave
them what they asked, and privately owned myself a
simpleton. There is a decorum which restrains you (un-
less you happen to be a police-constable) from breaking
through a crust of plausible respectability, even when
you are certain that there is a knave beneath it.
After making myself as familiar as I decently could
with the poor streets, I became curious to see what kind
of a home was provided for the inhabitants at the public
expense, fearing that it must needs be a most comfortless
one, or else their choice (if choice it were) of so miser-
able a life outside was truly difficult to account for. Ac-
cordingly, I visited a great almshouse, and was glad to
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 269
observe how unexceptionably all the parts of the establish-
ment were carried on, and what an orderly life, full-fed,
sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary
exercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Possibly,
indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the cruel neces-
sity of being neat and clean, and even the comfort re-
sulting from these and other Christian-like restraints and
regulations, that constituted the principal grievance on
the part of the poor, shiftless inmates, accustomed to
a life-long luxury of dirt and harum-scarumness. The
wild life of the streets has perhaps as unforgetable a
charm, to those who have once thoroughly imbibed it, as
the life of the forest or the prairie. But I conceive
rather that there must be insuperable difficulties, for the
majority of the poor, in the way of getting admittance to
the almshouse, than that a merely aesthetic preference
for the street would incline the pauper-class to fare
scantily and precariously, and expose their raggedness
to the rain and snow, when such a hospitable door stood
wide open for their entrance. It might be that the
roughest and darkest side of the matter was not shown
me, there being persons of eminent station and of both
sexes in the party which I accompanied ; and, of course, a
properly trained public functionary would have deemed
it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to ex-
hibit anything to people of rank that might too painfully
shock their sensibilities.
The women's ward was the portion of the establish-
ment which we especially examined. It could not be
questioned that they were treated with kindness as well
as care. No doubt, as has been already suggested, some
of them felt the irksomeness of submission to general
rules of orderly behavior, after being accustomed to that
perfect freedom from the minor proprieties, at least, which
is one of the compensations of absolutely hopeless pov-
erty, or of any circumstances that set us fairly below the
decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house
whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and
order among his inmates ; and he informed me that his
troubles among the women were incomparably greater
2 yo OUR OLD HOME
than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be
quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another
in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to
thwart his own authority by the like intangible methods.
He said this with the utmost good-nature, and quite won
my regard by so placidly resigning himself to the in-
evitable necessity of letting the women throw dust into
his eyes. They certainly looked peaceable and sisterly
enough, as I saw them, though still it might be faintly
perceptible that some of them were consciously playing
their parts before the governor and his distinguished
visitors.
This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for
his position. An American, in an office of similar re-
sponsibility, would doubtless be a much superior person,
better educated, possessing a far wider range of thought,
more naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external ob-
servation and a readier faculty of dealing with difficult
cases. The women would not succeed in throwing half
so much dust into his eyes. Moreover, his black coat,
and thin, sallow visage, would make him look like a
scholar, and his manners would indefinitely approximate
to those of a gentleman. But I cannot help question-
ing, whether, on the whole, these higher endowments
would produce decidedly better results. The English-
man was thoroughly plebeian both in aspect and be-
havior, a bluff, ruddy-faced, hearty, kindly, yeoman -like
personage, with no refinement whatever, nor any super-
fluous sensibility, but gifted with a native wholesomeness
of character which must have been a very beneficial
element in the atmosphere of the almshouse. He spoke
to his pauper family in loud, good-humored, cheerful
tones, and treated them with a healthy freedom that
probably caused the forlorn wretches to feel as if they
were free and healthy likewise. If he had understood
them a little better, he would not have treated them half
so wisely. We are apt to make sickly people more mor-
bid, and unfortunate people more miserable, by endeavor-
ing to adapt our deportment to their especial and
individual needs. They eagerly accept our well-meant
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 271
efforts ; but it is like returning their own sick breath
back upon themselves, to be breathed over and over
again, intensifying the inward mischief at every repe-
tition. The sympathy that would really do them good
is of a kind that recognizes their sound and healthy
parts, and ignores the part affected by disease, which will
thrive under the eye of a too close observer like a poison-
ous weed in the sunshine. My good friend the governor
had no tendencies in the latter direction, and abundance
of them in the former, and was consequently as whole-
some and invigorating as the west wind with a little
spice of the north in it, brightening the dreary visages
that encountered us as if he had carried a sunbeam in
his hand. He expressed himself by his whole being and
personality, and by works more than words, and had the
not unusual English merit of knowing what to do much
better than how to talk about it.
The women, I imagine, must have felt one imperfec-
tion in their state, however comfortable otherwise. They
were forbidden, or, at all events, lacked the means, to
follow out their natural instinct of adorning themselves ;
all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked
gowns, with such caps upon their heads as English ser-
vants wear. Generally, too, they had one dowdy Eng-
lish aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly alike
that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood.
We have few of these absolutely unilluminated faces
among our native American population, individuals of
whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mixing as we
do, no drop of gentle blood has contributed to refine the
turbid element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has
lighted up the stolid eyes, which their forefathers brought
from the Old Country. Even in this English almshouse,
however, there was at least one person who claimed to be
intimately connected with rank and wealth. The gov-
ernor, after suggesting that this person would probably
be gratified by our visit, ushered us into a small parlor,
which was furnished a little more like a room in a private
dwelling than others that we entered, and had a row of
religious books and fashionable novels on the mantel-
272 OUR OLD HOME
piece. An old lady sat at a bright coal fire, reading a
romance, and rose to receive us with a certain pomp of
manner and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy,
which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the
genuineness of her aristocratic pretensions. But, at any
rate, she looked like a respectable old soul, and was evi-
dently gladdened to the very core of her frost-bitten
heart by the awful punctiliousness with which we re-
sponded to her gracious and hospitable, though unfa-
miliar welcome. After a little polite conversation, we
retired ; and the governor, with a lowered voice and an
air of deference, told us that she had been a lady of
quality, and had ridden in her own equipage, not many
years before, and now lived in continual expectation that
some of her rich relatives would drive up in their car-
riages to take her away. Meanwhile, he added, she was
treated with great respect by her fellow-paupers. I could
not help thinking, from a few criticisable peculiarities in
her talk and manner, that there might have been a mis-
take on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial exag-
geration on the old lady's, concerning her former position
in society ; but what struck me was the forcible instance
of that most prevalent of English vanities, the preten-
sion to aristocratic connection, on one side, and the sub-
mission and reverence with which it was accepted by the
governor and his household, on the other. Among our-
selves, I think, when wealth and eminent position have
taken their departure, they seldom leave a pallid ghost
behind them, or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few
recognize it.
We went into several other rooms, at the doors of
which, pausing on the outside, we could hear the volu-
bility, and sometimes the wrangling, of the female in-
habitants within, but invariably found silence and peace
when we stepped over the threshold. The women were
grouped together in their sitting-rooms, sometimes three
or four, sometimes a larger number, classified by their
spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all busied, so far
as I can remember, with the one occupation of knitting
coarse yarn stockings. Hardly any of them, I am sorry
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 273
to say, had a brisk or cheerful air, though it often stirred
them up to a momentary vivacity to be accosted by the
governor, and they seemed to like being noticed, how-
ever slightly, by the visitors. The happiest person
whom I saw there (and, running hastily through my
experiences, I hardly recollect to have seen a happier one
in my life, if you take a careless flow of spirits as happi-
ness) was an old woman that lay in bed among ten or
twelve heavy-looking females, who plied their knitting-
work round about her. She laughed, when we entered,
and immediately began to talk to us, in a thin, little,
spirited quaver, claiming to be more than a century old ;
and the governor (in whatever way he happened to be
cognizant of the fact) confirmed her age to be a hundred
and four. Her jauntiness and cackling merriment were
really wonderful. It was as if she had got through with
all her actual business in life two or three generations ago,
and now, freed from every responsibility for herself or
others, had only to keep up a mirthful state of mind till
the short time, or long time, (and, happy as she was, she
appeared not to care whether it were long or short,)
before Death, who had misplaced her name in his list,
might remember to take her away. She had gone quite
round the circle of human existence, and come back to
the play-ground again. And so she had grown to be a
kind of miraculous old pet, the plaything of people
seventy or eighty years younger than herself, who talked
and laughed with her as if she were a child, finding
great delight in her wayward and strangely playful
responses, into some of which she cunningly conveyed
a gibe that caused their ears to tingle a little. She had
done getting out of bed in this world, and lay there to
be waited upon like a queen or a baby.
In the same room sat a pauper who had once been an
actress of considerable repute, but was compelled to give
up her profession by softening of the brain. The dis-
ease seemed to have stolen the continuity out of her life,
and disturbed all healthy relationship between the
thoughts within her and the world without. On our
first entrance, she looked cheerfully at us, and showed
274 OUR OLD HOME
herself ready to engage in conversation ; but suddenly,
while we were talking with the century-old crone, the
poor actress began to weep, contorting her face with
extravagant stage-grimaces, and wringing her hands for
some inscrutable sorrow. It might have been a remi-
niscence of actual calamity in her past life, or, quite as
probably, it was but a dramatic woe, beneath which she
had staggered and shrieked and wrung her hands with
hundreds of repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres,
and been as often comforted by thunders of applause.
But my idea of the mystery was, that she had a sense of
wrong in seeing the aged woman (whose empty vivacity
was like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as
the central object of interest to the visitors, while she her-
self, who had agitated thousands of hearts with a breath,
sat starving for the admiration that was her natural food.
I appeal to the whole society of artists of the Beautiful
and the Imaginative, poets, romancers, painters, sculp-
tors, actors, whether or no this is a grief that may be
felt even amid the torpor of a dissolving brain !
We looked into a good many sleeping-chambers,
where were rows of beds, mostly calculated for two
occupants, and provided with sheets and pillow-cases
that resembled sackcloth. It appeared to me that the
sense of beauty was insufficiently regarded in all the
arrangements of the almshouse ; a little cheap luxury
for the eye, at least, might do the poor folks a substan-
tial good. But, at all events, there was the beauty of
perfect neatness and orderliness, which, being heretofore
known to few of them, was perhaps as much as they
could well digest in the remnant of their lives. We
were invited into the laundry, where a great washing
and drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being
hot and vaporous with the steam of wet garments and
bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper-life of the
past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state, and
breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to in-
hale the strange element into our inmost being. Had
the Queen been there, I know not how she could have
escaped the necessity. What an intimate brotherhood
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 275
is this in which we dwell, do what we may to put an
artificial remoteness between the high creature and the
low one ! A poor man's breath, borne on the vehicle of
tobacco-smoke, floats into a palace-window and reaches
the nostrils of a monarch. It is but an example, obvi-
ous to the sense, of the innumerable and secret channels
by which, at every moment of our lives, the flow and
reflux of a common humanity pervade us all. How
superficial are the niceties of such as pretend to keep
aloof ! Let the whole world be cleansed, or not a man
or woman of us all can be clean.
By and by we came to the ward where the children
were kept, on entering which, we saw, in the first place,
several unlovely and unwholesome little people lazily
playing together in a courtyard. And here a singular
incommodity befell one member of our party. Among
the children was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing,
(about six years old, perhaps, but I know not whether a
girl or a boy,) with a humor in its eyes and face, which
the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared
to bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddled about
gropingly, as if in quest of it did not precisely know
what. This child this sickly, wretched, humor-eaten
infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow,
whom it must have required several generations of guilty
progenitors to render so pitiable an object as we beheld
it immediately took an unaccountable fancy to the
gentleman just hinted at. It prowled about him like a
pet kitten, rubbing against his legs, following every-
where at his heels, pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last,
exerting all the speed that its poor limbs were capable
of, got directly before him and held forth its arms,
mutely insisting on being taken up. It said not a word,
being perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle.
But it smiled up in his face, a sort of wof ul gleam
was that smile, through the sickly blotches that covered
its features, and found means to express such a per-