MISTAKEN CHARITY.
Slip was riding a big chestnut mare down the street and humming an accompaniment to the tune she was playing with her bit. He pulled up when he saw me and, still humming, sat looking down at me.
"Stables in ten minutes," I said. "You're heading the wrong way."
"A dispensation, my lad," he replied. "I'm taking Miss Spangles up on the hill to get her warm—'tis a nipping and an eager air."
A man was coming across the road towards us. He was incredibly old and stiff and the dirt of many weeks was upon him. He stood before us and held out a battered yachting cap. "M'sieur," he said plaintively.
Miss Spangles cocked an ear and began to derange the surface of the road with a shapely foreleg. She was bored.
"Tell him," said Slip, "that I am poorer even than he is; that this beautiful horse which he admires so much is the property of the King of ENGLAND, and that my clothes are not yet paid for."
I passed this on.
"M'sieur," said the old man, holding the yachting cap a little nearer.
"Give him a piece of money to buy soap with," said Slip. "Come up, Topsy," and he trotted slowly on.
I gave the old man something for soap and went my way.
That night at dinner the Mandril, who loves argument better than life, said à propos of nothing that any man who gave to a beggar was a public menace and little better than a felon. He was delighted to find every man's hand against him.
"RUSKIN," said Slip, "decrees that not only should one give to beggars, but that one should give kindly and deliberately and not as though the coin were red-hot."
The Mandril threw himself wildly into the argument. He told us dreadful stories of beggars and their ways—of advertisements he had seen in which the advertisers undertook to supply beggars with emaciated children at so much per day. Children with visible sores were in great demand, he said; nothing like a child to charm money from the pockets of passers-by, etc., etc. Presently he grew tired and changed the subject as rapidly as he had started it.
It was at lunch a few days later that the Mess waiter came in with a worried look on his face.
"There is a man at the door, Sir," he said. "Me and Burler can't make out what he wants, but he won't go away, not no'ow."
"What's he like?" I asked.
"Oh, he's old, Sir, and none too clean, and he's got a sack with him."
"Stop," said Slip. "Now, Tailer, think carefully before you answer my next question. Does he wear a yachting cap?"
"Yes, Sir," said Tailer, "that's it, Sir, 'e do wear a sort of sea 'at, Sir."
"This is very terrible," said Slip. "Are we his sole means of support? However—" and he drew a clean plate towards him and put a franc on it. The plate went slowly round the table and everyone subscribed. Stephen, who was immersed in a book on Mayflies, put in ten francs under the impression that he was subscribing towards the rent of the Mess. The Mandril appeared to have quite forgotten his dislike of beggars.
Tailer took the plate out and returned with it empty. "He's gone, Sir," he said.
"I'm glad for your sake, dear Mandril, that you have fallen in with our views," said Slip.
"What!" shouted the Mandril. "I quite forgot. A beggar!—the wretched impostor." He rushed to the window. An old man had rounded the corner of the house and was crossing the road on his way to a small café opposite.
"He's going to drink it," screamed the Mandril; "battery will fire a salvo;" and he seized two oranges from the sideboard. The first was a perfect shot and hit the target between the shoulder-blades, and the second burst with fearful force against the wall of the café. The victim turned and looked about him in a dazed fashion and then disappeared.
That night I received a note from Monsieur Le Roux, hardware merchant and incidentally our landlord, thanking me for sixteen francs seventy-five centimes paid in advance to his workman, and asking me to name a day on which he could call to mend our broken stove.
"It is not a little pathetic to observe that a year ago, and even two years ago, The Daily Mail was urging the Government then in power to introduce compulsory rations. Thus on November 13, 1916, we said: 'Ministers should at once prepare the organisation for a system of bread tickets. It took the diligent Germans six months to get their system into action, and it will take our ... officials quite as long. They ought to be getting to work on it now, not putting it off.'"—Daily Mail.
We dare not guess what was the suppressed adjective that The Daily Mail applied to "our officials."
