translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to
English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman
who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot
recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all
speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached,
and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect
"familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman
could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity
of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so
complete the character of the sentence.

The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of
excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal. And everywhere in
the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to
beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can
hardly reply without kindness. Where the tourist is thoroughly well
known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the
rich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be some
dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive