,
will then confide in him as if he and in-doors had never been acquainted.

We had taken with us a sparing lunch of thin sandwiches and a frugal
flask of modest, blushing brandy, which we diluted at a stingy little
fountain spring which dropped economically through a rift in the rock, as
if its nymph were conscious that such a delicious drink should not be
wasted. As it was, it refreshed us, and we were resting in a blessed
repose under the green leaves, when we heard footsteps, and an old woman
came walking by.

She was the ideal of decent and extreme poverty. I never saw anybody who
was at once so poor and so clean. In her face and in her thin garments
was marked the mute, resolute struggle between need and self-respect,
which, to him who understands it, is as brave as any battle between life
and death. She walked on as if she would have gone past without a word,
but when we greeted her she paused, and spoke respectfully. Without
forwardness she told her sad and simple story: how she belonged to the
Wesleyan confession, how her daughter was dying in the hospital at
Caernarvon; how she had walked sixty miles to see her, and hoped to get
there in time to close her eyes. In reply to a question as to her means,
she admitted that they were exhausted, but that she could get through
without money; she did not beg. And then came naturally enough the rest
of the little artless narrative, as it generally happens among the simple
annals of the poor: how she had been for forty years a washerwoman, and
had a letter from her clergyman.

There was a tear in the eye of the elder professor, and his hand was in
his pocket. The younger smoked in silence. I was greatly moved
myself,--perhaps bewildered would be the better word,--when, all at once,
as the old woman turned in the sunlight, I caught the expression _of the
corner of an eye_!

My friend Salaman, who boasts that he is of the last of the
Sadducees,--that strange, ancient, and secret sect, who disguise
themselves as the _Neu Reformirte_,--declares that the Sephardim may be
distinguished from the Ashkenazim as readily as from the confounded
Goyim, by the corners of their eyes. This he illustrated by pointing out
to me, as they walked by in the cool of the evening, the difference
between the eyes of Fraulein Eleonora Kohn and Senorita Linda Abarbanel
and divers and sundry other young ladies,--the result being that I
received in return thirty-six distinct _oeillades_