Slip was riding a big chestnut mare down the street and humming an accompaniment to the tune she was playing with her bit. He pulled up when he saw me and, still humming, sat looking down at me.
"Stables in ten minutes," I said. "You're heading the wrong way."
"A dispensation, my lad," he replied. "I'm taking Miss Spangles up on the hill to get her warm--'tis a nipping and an eager air."
A man was coming across the road towards us. He was incredibly old and stiff and the dirt of many weeks was upon him. He stood before us and held out a battered yachting cap. "M'sieur," he said plaintively.
Miss Spangles cocked an ear and began to derange the surface of the road with a shapely foreleg. She was bored.
"Tell him," said Slip, "that I am poorer even than he is; that this beautiful horse which he admires so much is the property of the King of ENGLAND, and that my clothes are not yet paid for."
"M'sieur," said the old man, holding the yachting cap a little nearer.
"Give him a piece of money to buy soap with," said Slip. "Come up, Topsy," and he trotted slowly on.
I gave the old man something for soap and went my way.
That night at dinner the Mandril, who loves argument better than life, said _à propos_ of nothing that any man who gave to a beggar was a public menace and little better than a felon. He was delighted to find every man's hand against him.
"RUSKIN," said Slip, "decrees that not only should one give to beggars, but that one should give kindly and deliberately and not as though the coin were red-hot."
The Mandril threw himself wildly into the argument. He told us dreadful stories of beggars and their ways--of advertisements he had seen in which the advertisers undertook to supply beggars with emaciated children at so much per day. Children with visible sores were in great demand, he said; nothing like a child to charm money from the pockets of passers-by, etc., etc. Presently he grew tired and changed the subject as rapidly as he had started it.
It was at lunch a few days later that the Mess waiter came in with a worried look on his face.
"There is a man at the door, Sir," he said. "Me and Burler can't make out what he wants, but he won't go away, not no'ow."
"Oh, he's old, Sir, and none too clean, and he's got a sack with him."
