Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/91

 head nodded, but his open and outstretched palm rested on his knee—a permanent money-box!

Although exhibitions like this are enough to shut the heart in a country where the earth yields almost for the asking, yet there are cases of misery that do not appeal in vain.

A poor little beggar-boy attracted my attention by haunting the door of the Gran Sociedad. We noticed him first by seeing something coiled up in the corner of the portal, which looked like a dirty puppy dog, shivering with the cold. Slowly, however, at our approach, it unwound itself from the lair, and a poor little boy tottered toward us with the most wan and wretched look I ever beheld, and the most beautiful black eyes that ever appealed for charity. He was a personification of poor Oliver Twist—a perfect little atomy. We gave him a real, and he trotted off delighted; yet his feeble limbs, around which there was scarcely any clothing, refused to carry him twenty steps: he tottered and fell against the wall to which he clung for support. I went to him again: "Muero de los frios, señor,"—I am dying of the chills, said he, in his little piping voice, rendered almost inarticulate from pain, accompanied by that slow motion of the head from side to side indicative of suffering.

We put a small blanket over him, gave him shoes and food, and thus strengthened and warmed, he gradually reached home.

The next day he made his appearance again, without shoes, shirt, or blanket, and with no covering but his ragged trowsers of cotton, tied across his shoulder with a piece of twine, and an old handkerchief about his neck. It was decided that he was a professional beggar, and his pains were but capital acting.

I did not think so, however; and while others speedily rejected him, I determined to satisfy myself that a human being would voluntarily starve himself until the bones peered through his shrunken skin, before I would deny the sufferer the comfort of a daily morsel. Upon inquiry, I found that his story was true: that he was the only child of a bed-ridden mother, who, confined with rheumatism to a mat stretched on the earthen floor of a hovel in the suburb, had been unable to provide food for herself or her son for more than a month. Besides this, the urchin had sold the shoes and blanket we had given him to buy bread for his parent.

He was a regular pensioner afterward, and his mother recovered. The last time I saw him was in the Alameda, to which he had crawled, saying that the "sunshine felt so comfortable, and that in its broad walks he did not suffer so much from the 'frios.'"

For a long period, after this, I missed the urchin, and knew not what had become of him; until one afternoon passing the wall of the convent of Santa Clara, I saw a man trotting along at the usual Indian gait, with a tray on his head which appeared to be covered with roses. Behind him was a ragged lépera, in tears, with her long black hair hanging over her shoulders. As the man passed me, I looked into the tray and found it contained a corpse. It was that of a child who had died of