“No doubt.  I shouldn’t answer at all.  I tell you I never talk with these creatures.  I can’t.  If an old woman stops me, with her dried-apple face and whining voice, I give her a sixpence and tell her to hush up and go about her business.  I fling coppers to the boys with slit breeches before they ask me, for I know they will tell me of mothers sick with consumption.  Their devilish tears are contagious; and I can’t cry; it chokes me.  So I buy apples and oranges from the imploring-looking girls; it’s the easiest way of getting rid of them.  The little change don’t amount to much in a day, and I save my nerves and my digestion at a cheap rate.”

Mr. Holworthy smiled at Easelmann’s notion of his own hard-heartedness, and said, hesitatingly,—­

“I am afraid that some professedly charitable persons don’t do so much.”

“Of course they don’t.  I don’t mean that I do anything.  It’s pure selfishness on my part, as I told you.  But you may feel pretty sure, that, if a man’s name is always in the papers, as ’our estimable fellow-citizen, President This, Director That, and Treasurer T’other,’ he ’does not give indiscriminate alms’:—­I believe that is the phrase.  Perhaps he won’t rob, like my friend Sandford; but his ’disinterested labors’ are an economical substitute for substantial charity, and his desire for a place in the public eye is the mainspring of all his actions.”

“Most of the distress in the community is relieved by organized effort; individual charities, however well meant, would be entirely inadequate.  Besides, you should not be severe upon all because one prominent person has proved unworthy.”

“Sandford is a type of the class.  If there is anybody I hate worse than a sick beggar, it is a man who makes a trade of philanthropy.”

“And yet you are consenting to your friend’s earning a living by teaching a ragged school.”

“True, one may stop at any place in a storm, just for shelter.”

“And you can console yourself further with the assurance that your friend won’t make enough in this place to induce him to take up the ‘trade,’ as you call it.”

“I hope not.  Starve him judiciously.  If he should come out, after a year or so, with a white neckcloth, spectacles, and a sanctified face, soliciting aid for his school, in Pecksniffian tones, I should regret that I hadn’t furnished him with a cord and a bag of stones to drop himself into the dock with.”

“I don’t know why a teacher or a street-missionary may not be a gentleman.”

“Sure enough, why not?  Whatever Walter Monroe is, he will always be a gentleman.”

“Suppose you bring him to see me to-morrow or next day; we will talk about this.”

“I will.  Now, good-bye!  My regrets to the children that we couldn’t finish our romp.”

“Good-bye,” said Holworthy.  “Come again; the children will be glad to see you.”

CHAPTER XVII.