portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that
of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made
to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed,
uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote,
thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to
the violence of the rich.

It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared. If a beggar is
still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort us
to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardly
intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance,
of no good influence upon the morals of the road. He no longer trusts
the world with a sight of his gaiety. He is not a wholehearted
mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby
an unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind. The
merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches
of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible
to the seated and stable social world.

The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our
literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by
tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been
stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led
underground. The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of
the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have
ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears. But it seems
that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the
subject of a Spanish song.

That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it is