THE BEGGARS OF SEVILLE.

Mataura Ensign, Volume V, Issue 224, 26 January 1883, Page 6

THE BEGGARS OF SEVILLE.

The mendicants of Seville are much more daring and pertinacious than their craft elsewhere. They call your attention with a sharp " tst, tst," as if you were hired to go through life casually, stopping the instant they summon you. There was in particular one energetic man who never failed to pounce upon us from his lair, and place some few inches in front of us the red and twisted stump from which his hand had been severed. He had seemingly persuaded himself that our journey of several thousand miles was undertaken principally to inspect this anatomical specimen. The amount of execution he did with that mutilated member was enough to shame any ablebodied, self-supporting person. With a single wave of it he could put us to flight. The effect would not have been more instantaneous if he had suddenly unmasked a mitrailleuse a yard from our noses. To assume unconsciousness was ■ futile, for, whichever way we turned, he was always (it would hardly be correct to say "on hand, " but) on time with his fingerless deformity — he always placed it, with the instinct of a finished artist, in the best light and most effective pose — getting it adroitly between v and anything we pretended to look ajb. ;I imagined the noble cathedral might afford a refuge from such attacks, but every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are pepetually stealing yi and out noiselessly under cover of their archly draped lace veils— losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the day-light glare again—are careful to drop some slight consciencemoney into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that passes him a silver piece a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable Church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind. — Harper's Magazine.