VI


We were going to spend the rest of the day driving out through the city
into the country beyond the Tagus, and we drove off in our really
splendid turnout through swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses'
bells drowned when we left them to their despair at the hotel door. At
the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic misery
which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I have since had
moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown big and little dogs
broadcast among them. They could not all have been begging for the
profit or pleasure of it; some of them were imaginably out of work and
worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin to fear them. I am
glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind
eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the
music of our horses' bells.

The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their
haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the
driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy
whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who
know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and
he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of
him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver
as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the
feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave
the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal