I recall a few occasional mendicants whose faces were less familiar.  One afternoon a most extraordinary Irishman, with a black eye, a bruised hat, and other traces of past enjoyment, waited upon me with a pitiful story of destitution and want, and concluded by requesting the usual trifle.  I replied, with some severity, that if I gave him a dime he would probably spend it for drink.  “Be Gorra! but you’re roight—­I wad that!” he answered promptly.  I was so much taken aback by this unexpected exhibition of frankness that I instantly handed over the dime.  It seems that Truth had survived the wreck of his other virtues; he did get drunk, and, impelled by a like conscientious sense of duty, exhibited himself to me in that state a few hours after, to show that my bounty had not been misapplied.

In spite of the peculiar characters of these reminiscences, I cannot help feeling a certain regret at the decay of Professional Mendicancy.  Perhaps it may be owing to a lingering trace of that youthful superstition which saw in all beggars a possible prince or fairy, and invested their calling with a mysterious awe.  Perhaps it may be from a belief that there is something in the old-fashioned alms-givings and actual contact with misery that is wholesome for both donor and recipient, and that any system which interposes a third party between them is only putting on a thick glove, which, while it preserves us from contagion, absorbs and deadens the kindly pressure of our hand.  It is a very pleasant thing to purchase relief from the annoyance and trouble of having to weigh the claims of an afflicted neighbor.  As I turn over these printed tickets, which the courtesy of the San Francisco Benevolent Association has—­by a slight stretch of the imagination in supposing that any sane unfortunate might rashly seek relief from a newspaper office—­conveyed to these editorial hands, I cannot help wondering whether, when in our last extremity we come to draw upon the Immeasurable Bounty, it will be necessary to present a ticket.

“Seeing the steamer off”

I have sometimes thought, while watching the departure of an Eastern steamer, that the act of parting from friends—­so generally one of bitterness and despondency—­is made by an ingenious Californian custom to yield a pleasurable excitement.  This luxury of leave-taking, in which most Californians indulge, is often protracted to the hauling in of the gang-plank.  Those last words, injunctions, promises, and embraces, which are mournful and depressing perhaps in that privacy demanded on other occasions, are here, by reason of their very publicity, of an edifying and exhilarating character.  A parting kiss, blown from the deck of a steamer into a miscellaneous crowd, of course loses much of that sacred solemnity with which foolish superstition is apt to invest it.  A broadside of endearing epithets, even when properly aimed and apparently raking the whole wharf, is apt