Mrs. Dixon, assisted by Henrietta, was, it seemed, the lady high almoner,
who dispensed these charities. As she said to Mrs. Colley, they would end
by keeping all the beggars in the county, and they really couldn't afford
it. A large family was an expensive thing, and the girls _must_ have new
frocks. "Mr. Dixon is always telling me and the girls that we must not
_demoralize_ the people by indiscriminate charity." Lucian had heard of
these sage counsels, and through it them as he listened to the bitter
complaints of the gaunt, hungry old women. In the back street by which he
passed out of the town he saw a large "healthy" boy kicking a sick cat;
the poor creature had just strength enough to crawl under an outhouse
door; probably to die in torments. He did not find much satisfaction in
thrashing the boy, but he did it with hearty good will. Further on, at
the corner where the turnpike used to be, was a big notice, announcing a
meeting at the school-room in aid of the missions to the Portuguese.
"Under the Patronage of the Lord Bishop of the Diocese," was the imposing
headline; the Reverend Merivale Dixon, vicar of Caermaen, was to be in
the chair, supported by Stanley Gervase, Esq., J.P., and by many of the
clergy and gentry of the neighborhood. Senhor Diabo, "formerly a Romanist
priest, now an evangelist in Lisbon," would address the meeting. "Funds
are urgently needed to carry on this good work," concluded the notice. So
he lay well back in the shade of the hedge, and thought whether some sort
of an article could not be made by vindicating the terrible Yahoos; one
might point out that they were in many respects a simple and
unsophisticated race, whose faults were the result of their enslaved
position, while such virtues as they had were all their own. They might
be compared, he thought, much to their advantage, with more complex
civilizations. There was no hint of anything like the Beit system of
publishing in existence amongst them; the great Yahoo nation would surely
never feed and encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled for his foulness
from the horse-community, and the witty dean, in all his minuteness, had