THE BEGGARS
I WAS walking down Piccadilly not long ago, thinking of nursery rhymes and regretting old romance.
As I saw the shopkeepers walk by in their black frockcoats and their black hats, I thought of the old line in nursery annals, "The merchants of London, they wear scarlet."
The streets were all so unromantic, dreary. Nothing could be done for them, I thought—nothing. And then my thoughts were interrupted by barking dogs. Every dog in the street seemed to be barking—every kind of dog, not only the little ones but the big ones too. They were all facing East towards the way I was coming by. Then I turned round to look and had this vision, in Piccadilly, on the opposite side to the houses just after you pass the cab-rank.
Tall, bent men were coming down the street arrayed in marvellous cloaks. All were sallow of skin and swarthy of hair, and the most of them wore strange beards. They were coming slowly, and they walked with staves, and their hands were out for alms.
All the beggars had come to town.
I would have given them a gold doubloon engraven with the towers of Castille, but I had no such coin. They did not seem the people to whom it were fitting to offer the same coin as one tendered for the use of a taixicab (O marvellous, ill-made word, surely the pass-word somewhere of some evil order). Some of them wore purple cloaks with wide green
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