Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/160

144 upon being asked by whom? he lifted up his eyes towards the ceiling, and made no further defence. He left his cause to "God and his country," and got off, as is too often done, by the connivance of his prosecutor, who made a wilful mistake in the indictment.

All descriptions of beggars sally out of town in the fine summer weather, some few take to harvesting, others to pilfering, and all beg their way back to town at the end of the season, in order to resume their old avocations and their former habits. Out of town, some will ask for alms at the front door while another gets over the walls behind.

One remark is worthy a place here; and that is, the great number of beggars who are actually receiving parish relief, at the moment they are asking for eleemosynary help. Not the insufficient help which consists of a few shillings per week, to pay the rent of a wretched room, in which to rest their emaciated limbs, but meat, drink, washing, lodging, and clothes, sufficient for their subsistence. Impatience under restraint, however, and the love of a wandering life, propel many of them to seek, beyond the walls of a workhouse, the precarious alms of the generous and the undiscriminating part of the community. A