given over two hundred copper coins for an English shilling, and he
distributed his largesses recklessly and with a lack of discrimination
entirely opposed to the precepts of his organized charities at home.
He found it so much more amusing to throw a handful of coppers to a
crowd of fat naked children than to write a check for the Society for
Suppression of Cruelty to the same beneficiaries.

"You shouldn't give those fellows money," the Consul-General once
remonstrated with him; "the fact that they're blind is only a proof
that they have been thieves. When they catch a man stealing here they
hold his head back, and pass a hot iron in front of his eyes. That's
why the lids are drawn taut that way. You shouldn't encourage them."

"Perhaps they're not _all_ thieves," said the District Attorney,
cheerfully, as he hit the circle around him with a handful of coppers;
"but there is no doubt about it that they're all blind. Which is the
more to be pitied," he asked the Consul-General, "the man who has
still to be found out and who can see, or the one who has been exposed
and who is blind?"

"How should he know?" said Carroll, laughing. "He's never been blind,
and he still holds his job."

"I don't think that's very funny," said the Consul-General.

A week of pig-sticking came to end Holcombe's stay in Tangier, and he
threw himself into it and into the freedom of its life with a zest
that made even the Englishman speak of him as a good fellow. He
chanced to overhear this, and stopped to consider what it meant. No
one had ever called him a good fellow at home, but then his life had