But to revert to our theme and to conclude it. As a West India merchant, Mr. Hawkins one day sent me down to Albury a hogshead of sugar and some sacks of rice, to be given (or, as he preferred it, sold at half price for honour's sake and not to pauperise) to my poorer neighbours for a Christmas gift. Well, to please him, I tried to sell, and only raised the rancour of the shopkeepers, who declared I was competing with them as a grocer: then I gave, with the same experience that soup charity had before taught me, to wit, that poor quarrelled with poorer, and both with me, for more or less given. So I was glad when it all came to an end. It is very difficult, as many a Lady Bountiful knows, to be charitable on a wide scale: _e.g._ once, in my country life, I tried to recommend brown bread and oatmeal; and got nothing by it but ill-will, as if wishing to starve the poor by denial of wheat-flour.
Most of us have been checked in such silly efforts to do good through forgetfulness of the fact that usually the poorest are the proudest. Even the luxurious _débris_ of London Club kitchens must be flung into swill-barrels for pigs, because starving men and women will not demean themselves to ask for it at the buttery-hatch. Moreover, that such are often extravagant too, everybody has found out--here's an instance: In my legal days, I now and then of course relieved poor folk, and sometimes passed through Seven Dials: casually, I looked in upon an old couple to whom I had occasionally given a trifle, believing them to be near starvation; and I found them roasting a brace of partridges--or was it quails? for they were waistcoated with bacon,--and I had the charity to hope they had _not_ stolen them! Anyhow, I never called there again. And, while I am in Seven Dials, let me record another useful small experience. There was a lapidary handy, who had at times cut my beach-found choanites for me. One day I found him making scarabæi out of bits of agate and lapis lazuli. "Who gave you an order for these," said I. "Well, sir, I don't rightly know his name; but he was a furriner." "Was the name Signor----?" "That's it, sir." Then I set off straight to Sotheby's where I knew the Signor's Egyptian antiquities were soon to be sold, and duly forewarned the auctioneer of these forgeries. I need not detail how at the sale he put buyers on their guard, exposing the fraud, and condemning the peccant scarabæi to extinction. I wonder how many Grecian bronzes and copper Buddhas have been cast in Birmingham!