Mrs. Dixon, assisted by Henrietta, was, it seemed, the lady high almoner, who dispensed these charities.  As she said to Mrs. Colley, they would end by keeping all the beggars in the county, and they really couldn’t afford it.  A large family was an expensive thing, and the girls must have new frocks.  “Mr. Dixon is always telling me and the girls that we must not demoralize the people by indiscriminate charity.”  Lucian had heard of these sage counsels, and through it them as he listened to the bitter complaints of the gaunt, hungry old women.  In the back street by which he passed out of the town he saw a large “healthy” boy kicking a sick cat; the poor creature had just strength enough to crawl under an outhouse door; probably to die in torments.  He did not find much satisfaction in thrashing the boy, but he did it with hearty good will.  Further on, at the corner where the turnpike used to be, was a big notice, announcing a meeting at the school-room in aid of the missions to the Portuguese.  “Under the Patronage of the Lord Bishop of the Diocese,” was the imposing headline; the Reverend Merivale Dixon, vicar of Caermaen, was to be in the chair, supported by Stanley Gervase, Esq., J.P., and by many of the clergy and gentry of the neighborhood.  Senhor Diabo, “formerly a Romanist priest, now an evangelist in Lisbon,” would address the meeting.  “Funds are urgently needed to carry on this good work,” concluded the notice.  So he lay well back in the shade of the hedge, and thought whether some sort of an article could not be made by vindicating the terrible Yahoos; one might point out that they were in many respects a simple and unsophisticated race, whose faults were the result of their enslaved position, while such virtues as they had were all their own.  They might be compared, he thought, much to their advantage, with more complex civilizations.  There was no hint of anything like the Beit system of publishing in existence amongst them; the great Yahoo nation would surely never feed and encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled for his foulness from the horse-community, and the witty dean, in all his minuteness, had said nothing of “safe” Yahoos.  On reflection, however, he did not feel quite secure of this part of his defense; he remembered that the leading brutes had favorites, who were employed in certain simple domestic offices about their masters, and it seemed doubtful whether the contemplated vindication would not break down on this point.  He smiled queerly to himself as he thought of these comparisons, but his heart burned with a dully fury.  Throwing back his unhappy memory, he recalled all the contempt and scorn he had suffered; as a boy he had heard the masters murmuring their disdain of him and of his desire to learn other than ordinary school work.  As a young man he had suffered the insolence of these wretched people about him; their cackling laughter at his poverty jarred and grated in his ears; he saw the acrid grin of some miserable idiot woman, some