among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as
consul naturally took him often to the police courts, where
magistrates passed upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in
the consulate itself he saw specimens enough of human crime and
misery. He visited the poor-house and the insane asylum, he was
approached by swindlers of all types, and often he went to fairs and
other resorts of public out-door amusement and watched the unwashed
populace at its play. Beggars followed him on the streets, awaited him
in their chosen coigns of vantage on the corners, or haunted him on
the ferry-boat that took him each day from his home to his office.
Wherever he encountered the forsaken of fortune, he found food for
sympathy, and, in spite of assurances that he was only encouraging
mendicancy, he often gave them money. It was hard for him to believe
that there could be abject poverty where there was work for all, and
the appeal of man in want to man in plenty was too strong for him
easily to resist it. He liked the very frankness of vulgarity and
hopeless destitution of these people, and was appalled by the
simplicity with which they accepted things as they were. There was no
restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It was harrowing
enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable to see them
acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned, after a
while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition; but the
refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving did in
purse.

The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed