Beggars are numerous everywhere, and are organized into a sort of union or guild, with a master at the head, whose word is law to his mendicant subjects, and whose laws are as unchanging as those of the Medes and Persians. No man can be buried without a large share of “funeral baked meats” falling to the lot of the beggars’ guild.
No person is allowed to marry by this powerful union unless he or his friends pay a tribute to the king of beggars, in the shape of a big feast and a sum of money.
The last varies from one to five hundred dollars, according to the means of the tribute payer. The feast must consist of as good food as is served to the wedding guests.
On this the beggar king and his cabinet dine, with as much gusto, if not as much ceremony, as the Emperor of China when feasting his ministers. In almost every city you will find a beggars’ guild. The subjects of any one king vary in number, according to the size of the city. These kings of China’s submerged millions, whose territories consist of streets, gutters, bridges, and doorsteps, and whose subjects have been won for him by poverty, accident, vice, and disease, exercise a patriarchal sway and dispense a rough and primitive justice. The office is not hereditary, but elective, and tenable for life.
The beggar king lives in a house that is almost a palace, compared to the miserable shelter that his subjects have to be contented with. Not infrequently he grows rich from the tribute paid him by the people of the upper crust of society. He has powerful means of enforcing his demands. He has means of annoyance which the police are unable to put a stop to.
Suppose a man about to marry refuses to recognize the claim of the beggar king. His wedding procession will be blocked by thousands of lame, halt, and leprous beggars, who will ease their minds by imprecations such as are unfit for a bride to hear, and will be sure to bring ill luck on the married couple. Else this unseemly rabble will besiege the house of the unlucky bridegroom, and go through a similar performance. It is worth a large sum to be rid of such pests.
Even the magistrates, autocrats as they are in their own realms, respect the office of the beggar king, and never offend him if they can avoid it.
Ordinarily beggars go from house to house and from shop to shop with a bowl in hand, into which is poured the handful of rice, or is dropped the copper coin of charity. They are irrepressible, and will not take “no” for an answer.
QUEER THINGS TO EAT.
At the department of agriculture in Washington, hidden away in an obscure corner, is an odd sort of exhibit of queer foods eaten by out-of-the-way people. There is a loaf of bread made from the roasted leaves of a plant allied to the century plant. Another kind of bread is from a dough of juniper berries. These are relished by some tribes of Indians, while others manufacture cakes out of different kinds of bulbs. The prairie Indians relish a dish of wild turnips, which civilized people would not be likely to enjoy at all. In the great American desert the “screw beans,” which grow on mesquite bushes, are utilized for food. Soap berries furnish an agreeable diet for some savages in this country, while in California the copper-colored aborigines do not disdain the seeds of salt grass. Also in California the Digger Indians collect pine nuts, which are seeds of a certain species of pine—sometimes called “pinions”—by kindling fires against the trees, thus causing the nuts to fall out of the cones. At the same time a sweet gum exudes from the bark, serving the purpose of sugar. The seeds of gourds are consumed in the shape of mush by Indians in Arizona.