hand and deprecating eye sometimes superadded.  She usually stood in my doorway, silent and patient, intimating her presence, if my attention were preoccupied, by a slight cough from her baby, whom I shall always believe had its part to play in this little pantomime, and generally obeyed a secret signal from the maternal hand.  It was useless for me to refuse alms, to plead business, or affect inattention.  She never moved; her position was always taken with an appearance of latent capabilities of endurance and experience in waiting which never failed to impress me with awe and the futility of any hope of escape.  There was also something in the reproachful expression of her eye which plainly said to me, as I bent over my paper, “Go on with your mock sentimentalities and simulated pathos; portray the imaginary sufferings of your bodiless creations, spread your thin web of philosophy, but look you, sir, here is real misery!  Here is genuine suffering!” I confess that this artful suggestion usually brought me down.  In three minutes after she had thus invested the citadel I usually surrendered at discretion, without a gun having been fired on either side.  She received my offering and retired as mutely and mysteriously as she had appeared.  Perhaps it was well for me that she did not know her strength.  I might have been forced, had this terrible woman been conscious of her real power, to have borrowed money which I could not pay, or have forged a check to purchase immunity from her awful presence.  I hardly know if I make myself understood, and yet I am unable to define my meaning more clearly when I say that there was something in her glance which suggested to the person appealed to, when in the presence of others, a certain idea of some individual responsibility for her sufferings, which, while it never failed to affect him with a mingled sense of ludicrousness and terror, always made an impression of unqualified gravity on the minds of the bystanders.  As she has disappeared within the last month, I imagine that she has found a home at the San Francisco Benevolent Association,—­at least, I cannot conceive of any charity, however guarded by wholesome checks or sharp-eyed almoners, that could resist that mute apparition.  I should like to go there and inquire about her, and also learn if the baby was convalescent or dead, but I am satisfied that she would rise up, a mute and reproachful appeal, so personal in its artful suggestions, that it would end in the Association instantly transferring her to my hands.

My next familiar mendicant was a vender of printed ballads.  These effusions were so stale, atrocious, and unsalable in their character, that it was easy to detect that hypocrisy, which—­in imitation of more ambitious beggary—­veiled the real eleemosynary appeal under the thin pretext of offering an equivalent.  This beggar—­an aged female in a rusty bonnet—­I unconsciously precipitated upon myself in an evil moment.  On our first meeting, while distractedly turning over