Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/75



charities of Madam L had become proverbial. Not only did the sufferers in her vicinity resort to her under the pressure of calamity, but the roving beggar trusted to find in her mansion, relief or shelter. These mendicants, not being restrained at that period by the fear of work-houses, were more numerous in proportion, and vastly more at ease in their peregrinations than at the present day. Although there were not among them, as in England, any selling of stands and circuits, fortunes secretly amassed, or establishments which transformed the gains of the day into nocturnal revels, where the cripple danced, and the blind recovered their sight; yet there existed that system of sympathetic intelligence, by which the houses of the bountiful were seldom unvisited, or those of the churl entered. Madam L, being one day summoned to the kitchen to receive a guest of that order, was accosted in piteous tones by a man, who raised him self with difficulty by the aid of a staff upon one limb, while