glances he encountered smote him as with fiery swords.  He quailed; he cowered; he dropped his eyes; he acquired a stooping, shambling gait.  The man who feels that he is looked down upon grows more diminutive in his own estimation, until he shrinks into the place which the world assigns him.  So Sandford shrunk, until he crept through the streets where once he had walked erect, and earned a support as meagre and precarious as the more brazen-faced and ragged of the great family of mendicants, to which he was gravitating.

Mendicants,—­an exceeding great army!  They do not all knock at area-doors for old clothes and broken victual, nor hold out hats at street-crossings, nor expose sharp-faced babies to win pity, nor send their infant tatterdemalions to torture the ears of the wealthy with scratchy fiddles and wheezing accordions.  No, these plagues of society are only the extreme left wing; the right wing is a very respectable class in the community.  The party-leader who makes his name and influence serve him in obtaining loans which he never intends to pay,—­shall we call him a beggar?  It is an ugly word.  The parasite who makes himself agreeable to dinner-givers, who calculates upon his accomplishments as a stock in trade, intending that his brains shall feed his stomach,—­what is he, pray?  It is ungracious to stigmatize such a jolly dog.  The woman whose fingers are hooped with rings won in wagers which gallantry or folly could not decline, who is ready by philopaena, or even by more direct suggestions, to lay every beau or acquaintance under contribution,—­is she a beggar, too?  It is a long way, to be sure, from the girl with scanty and draggled petticoat and tangled hair, picking out lumps of coal from ash-heaps, or carrying home refuse from the tables of the rich,—­a long way from that squalid object to the richly-cloaked, furred, bonneted, jewelled, flaunting lady, whose friends are all so kind.

But the most charitable must feel a certain degree of pity, if not of scorn, for those who, like Mr. and Miss Sandford, contrive to wear the outward semblance of respectability, boarding with fashionable people and wearing garments a la mode, while they have neither fortune nor visible occupation.  Miss Sandford, to be sure, had a few pupils in music,—­young friends, who, as she averred, “insisted upon practising with her, although she did not profess to give lessons,” not she.  Still her toilet was as elegant as ever.  The first appearance of a new style of cloak, a new pattern of silk or embroidery, new ribbons, laces, jewelry, might be observed, as she took her morning promenade.  The dealers in rich goods, elegant trifles, costly nothings, all knew her well.  Whatever satisfied her artistic taste she purchased.  To see was to desire, and, in some way, all she coveted tended by a magical attraction to her rooms.  “Society” frowned upon her; she went to no receptions in the higher circles, but she had no lack of associates for all that.