Few men can brave a city; and Sandford, certainly, was
not the man to do it. The scowling, or suspicious, or contemptuous,
pitying 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.
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