nd 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 the
ballads, I came upon a certain production entitled, I think, "The Fire
Zouave," and was struck with the truly patriotic and American manner
in which "Zouave" was made to rhyme in different stanzas with "grave,
brave, save, and glaive." As I purchased it at once, with a gratified
expression of countenance, it soon became evident that the act was
misconstrued by my poor friend, who from that moment never ceased to
haunt me. Perhaps in the whole course of her precarious existence she
had never before sold a ballad. My solitary purchase evidently made
me, in her eyes, a customer, and in a measure exalted her vocation; so
thereafter