The gate that once was closed each night by the smart and active ostler now stood back on one hinge, resting, therefore, partly on the ground.
And the stables once filled with prancing or neighing, or, at least, well-fed steeds, were at this time only warmed by the breath of beggars, too poor even to pay a groat for a night’s lodging, and who compounded with their host for a twopenny night’s straw in the outhouses.
Occasionally, indeed, some benighted and bestormed waggoner, unable to reach the usual place of his sojourn, would unwillingly or unwittingly stop at the “Travellers’ Rest,” and allow his horses to share the same fate as the beggars who surrounded them. But such visits were few and far between, and even waggon horses would avoid if they could “the vagrants’ lodging-house.”
The “Travellers’ Rest” was one of those houses which was known by all classes of mendicants, whether belonging to the silver class, or what are styled by all well-informed travellers barkers, to the highflyers or begging letterwriters to the shallow coves or impostors, who in various garbs obtain clothes from the compassionate and charitable to a great amount, and then sell them to the dealers as left-off garments—too often spending the produce in ardent spirits—to the shallow motts or females, who, like shallow coves, go nearly naked through the world, begging ever for clothes, ever obtaining them, and yet never clothing themselves, but selling them for food, for lodging, for drink, and for the enjoyment of every conceivable vice, as well as to the separate race of beggars and match-sellers, who live by the ordinary tales, true or false, of real or supposed misery, and in which class is to be found much more of suffering than crime, and of destitution and heart-rending woe than we are either accustomed to believe or like to inquire into.
It has been well said that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives, and the history of mendicants of every degree would furnish the outside public with strange revelations, many of which would appear almost incredible.
The mendicant poor are in every way a different race of beings to the working population of this country.
They have signs of their own, a language of their own, plans and schemes of their own, or rather for their own class, homes of their own, or rather barns and outbuildings, reserved by compassionate farmers and landowners for them. They split society into fractions, calculate with tolerable accuracy all their chances, and could tell in many cases how much they should receive in a week.
Generally speaking, they are distrustful of each other, living in a constant state of fear of arrest and imprisonment, concealing their own names even from their commonest associates, and changing their announced plans and movements in less than an hour, as they saw with a prophet’s eye a lion in their path.
But then how different are their classes!
There’s the systematic vagrant, whose life has been one of constant and unchanging mendicity.