I dare say poverty and the pangs of hunger and cold do not foster
habits of strict temperance. It is a great pity they do not, since they
are so common. If they did, they could do more than anything else to
advance the cause of prohibition. Still, I will not say that all the
poor I give to are in liquor at the moment, or that drunkenness is
peculiarly the vice of one-armed destitution. Neither is gratitude a
very common or articulate emotion in my beneficiaries. They are mostly,
if thankful at all, silently thankful; and I find this in better taste.
I do not believe that as a rule they are very imaginative, or at least
so imaginative as romantic novelists. Yet there was one sufferer came
up the back elevator on a certain evening not long ago, and burst upon
me suddenly, somehow as if he had come up through a trap in the stage,
who seemed to have rather a gift in that way. He was most amusingly
shabby and dirty (though I do not know why shabbiness and dirt should
be amusing), with a cutaway coat worn down to its ultimate gloss, a
frayed neckcloth, and the very foulest collar I can remember seeing.
But he had a brisk and pleasing address, and I must say an excellent
diction. He called me by name, and at once said that friends whom he
had expected to find in New York were most inopportunely in Europe at
this moment of his arrival from a protracted sojourn in the West. But
he was very anxious to get on that night to Hartford, and complete his
journey home from Denver, where he had fallen a prey to the hard times
in the very hour of the most prosperous speculation; and he proposed,
as an inducement to a loan, borrowing only enough money to take him to
New Haven by the boat--he would walk the rest of the way to Hartford.
I no more believed him than I should believe a ghost if it said it
was a ghost. But I believed that he was in want,--his clothes proved
that,--and I gave him the little sum he asked. He said he would send it
back the instant he reached Hartford; and I am left to think that he
has not yet arrived. But I am sure that even that brief moment of his
airy and almost joyous companionship was worth the money. He was of an
order of classic impostors dear to literature, and grown all too few in
these times of hurry and fierce competition. I wish I had seen more of
him, and yet I cannot say that I wish he would come back; it might be
embarrassing for both of us.
Not long before his visit I had a call from another imaginative
person, whom I was not able to meet so fully in her views. This was
a middle-aged lady who said she had come on that morning from Boston
to see me. She owned we had never met before, and that she was quite
unknown to me; but apparently she did not think this any bar to her
asking me for two hundred and fifty dollars to aid in the education of
her son. I confess that I was bewildered for a moment. My simple device
of offering half the amount demanded would have been too costly: I
really could not have afforded to give her one hundred and twenty-five
dollars, even if she had been willing to compromise, which I was not
sure of. I am afraid the reader will think I shirked. I said that I had
a great many demands upon me, and I ended by refusing to give anything.
I really do not know how I had the courage; perhaps it was only frenzy.
She insisted, with reasons for my giving which she laid before me; but
either they did not convince me, or I had hardened my heart so well
that they could not prevail with me, and she got up and went away. As
she went out of the room, she looked about its appointments, which I
had not thought very luxurious before, and said that she saw I was
able to _live_ very comfortably, at any rate; and left me to the mute
reproach of my carpets and easy-chairs.
I do not remember whether she alleged any inspiration in coming to see
me for this good object; but a summer or two since a lady came to me,
at my hotel in the mountains, who said that she had been moved to do so
by an impulse which seemed little short of mystical. She said that she
was not ordinarily superstitious, but she had wakened that morning in
Boston with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it seemed so
directly related to what she had in view that she could not resist the
suggestion it conveyed that she should come at once to lay her scheme
before me. She took a good deal of time to do this; and romantic as it
appeared, I felt sure that she was working with real material. It was
of a nature so complex, however, and on a scale so vast, that I should
despair of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will not
attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest; but at the end I was
obliged to say that I thought her mystical impulse was mistaken; I was
sorry it had deceived her; I was quite certain that I had not the means
or the tastes to enter upon the æsthetic enterprise which she proposed.
In return, I suggested a number of millionaires whose notorious
softness of heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the public by
their good deeds, ought to make them more available, and we parted the
best of friends. I am not yet quite able to make up my mind that she
was not the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen world, and
altogether innocent in her appeal to me.