Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/260

244 He assured me that, even allowing the man had not usually dealt at his shop, it was impossible that he should not have been several times there for some trifling article necessary in the hurry of his business. I then went to two or three other shops of a similar kind, and found that his name was entirely unknown. I therefore concluded that he was an impostor.

I will mention one other case, because it arose entirely out of an accident, and could not have been foreseen.

Living at that time much in society, I usually walked home from the hot rooms of an evening party wrapped in a stout cloak, even though it sometimes rained. On these occasions I was often placed in a most painful situation.

A half-clad miserable female, with an infant in her arms, and sometimes accompanied by another just able to walk, followed me through a drizzling rain to ask charity for her starving children.

I confess it was to me a most painful effort to resist such an application; yet my better reason informed me that in all probability these miserable children were hired for the purpose of exciting the feelings of the charitable. To give money to their heartless conductors could only be considered charitable, inasmuch as it might contribute to shorten the lives of their wretched victims.

I fear I gave wrongfully many a sixpence. I inquired into some cases, but without any result which could enable me to alter the opinion I have expressed. It was in one of these inquiries that the singular case I am now about to relate occurred.

In one of the densest of London fogs on a November night, or rather at between one and two o'clock in the morning, I was inquiring, in one of the most disreputable streets in London—George Street, St Giles's, long ago pulled down,