,
and turban scattered around him, he rises quietly, and exclaims, 'Allah
is great!' I know a Christian would have expended his wrath in a variety
of anathemas highly edifying, and close by wishing his unfortunate steed
in a much warmer climate than the Mohammedan has any idea of. I am a
poor church-man: let me emulate the philosophy of the simple child of
the desert, and when I fall into trouble bear it patiently.

"I wonder what the grim savage would do were he short of money in a land
thronging with beggars and other blissful adjuncts of civilization? Woe
unto every blind or club-foot man, and every one-armed or scalded woman,
_I_ meet to-day! They shall work out their own salvation with fear and
trembling, or I'm an idiot.

"Why, bless my soul, the fortunes bequeathed to all the novel-heroes
created this century, would not begin to supply them!"

Redfield shook his head decidedly when he came to this part of his
monologue, and put the gold and silver coins back into his pocket.

"I hate poor people--I positively do! I despise their pale faces and
cadaverous expression. I detest straggling little girls who come up to
you and say their mothers have been bedridden for three months, and all
their little brothers and sisters are down with the fever. I know it's
a lie. I can detect at once the professional whine, and am certain the
story has been repeated by rote a hundred times that day; but for the
life of me I cannot put out from my mind the imaginary picture of the
half-furnished room in some filthy back street, with a forlorn woman
with red hair stretched on a bed of straw, and half a dozen or more
red-haired children piled about promiscuously.

"There is a wretched little German girl, always managing to have a boil
either on her forehead or the back of her neck,--I believe in my soul
it's from overfeeding,--who follows my footsteps like a misanthropic
vampire. By what ingenuity she manages to cajole me out of my money I
know not, but I positively assert that in the last fortnight, according
to her account, her unhappy mother has suffered from eleven different
incurable diseases. My God! what a complication of misfortune! Why not
let them starve? When a man is not capable of maintaining a family, why
in Heaven's name does he ever have one?

"I think I will follow the maxims of political economists and all
respectable members of society, and vote beggars a nuisance. I wonder
how many people to-day, praying for d