"Go thou with God," was his answer.
Begging was a recognized and licensed industry in Madrid a year ago, though a bill of reform, whose fate I have failed to learn, was then under consideration. A mother would gather her brood about her and go forth for her day's work. They beg up and down their accustomed beat during the morning, eat as their gains allow, lie down in the dust together for the afternoon siesta, and rise to be diligent in business during the hours of fashionable promenade. They stop pedestrians, chase carriages, press into shops to torment the customers at the counter, and reach beseeching palms through the open windows of cafés. Gentlemen escorting ladies are their peculiar victims, for well they know that many a man who never gives under other circumstances is ashamed to seem ungenerous under survey of starry eyes.
There is only one phrase that will shake off the professional beggar, "May God aid you!" On hearing this he makes it a point of religious honor to fall back. But as I could not use that formula without feeling myself something between a shirk and a hypocrite, I had to get on as best I could with the ineffectual, "Pardon me, my brother," to which should properly be added Por Dios (for God's sake).
The Spanish mendicant knows nothing of the Anglo-Saxon feeling, "To beg I am ashamed." No Rare Ben Jonson has thundered in his ears:—
"Art thou a man? and sham'st thou not to beg?
To practise such a servile kind of life?
Why, were thy education ne'er so mean,
Having thy limbs, a thousand fairer courses
Offer themselves to thy election.
Either the wars might still supply thy wants