56 MEXICO. 
head nodded, but his open and outstretched palm rested on his knee — a 
permanent money-box ! 
Although exhibitions like this are enough to shut the heart in a coun- 
try where the earth yields almost for the asking, yet there are cases of 
misery that do not appeal in vain. 
A poor little beggar-boy attracted my attention by haunting the door of 
the Gran Sociedad. We noticed him first by seeing something coiled up 
in the corner of the portal, which looked like a dirty puppy dog, shiver- 
ing with the cold. Slowly, however, at our approach, it unwound itself 
from the lair, and a poor little boy- tottered toward us with the most 
wan and wretched look I ever beheld, and the most beautiful black eyes 
that ever appealed for charity. He was a personification of poor Oli- 
ver Twist — a perfect little atomy. We gave him a real, and he trotted 
off delighted: yet his feeble limbs, around which there was scarcely any 
clothing, refused to carry him twenty steps : he tottered and fell against 
the wall to which he clung for support. I went to him again : " Muero 
de Ids frios, senor," — I am dying of the chills, said he, in his little piping 
voice, rendered almost inarticulate from pain, accompanied by that slow 
motion of the head from side to side indicative of suffering. 
We put a small blanket over him, gave him shoes and food, and thus 
strengthened and warmed, he gradually reached home. 
The next day he made his appearance again, without shoes, shirt, or 
blanket, and with no covering but his ragged trowsers of cotton, tied 
across his shoulder with a piece of twine, and an old handkerchief about 
his neck. It was decided that he was a professional beggar, and his 
pains were but capital acting. 
] did r^ot think so, however ; and while others speedily rejected him, 1 
determined to satisfy myself that a human being would voluntarily starve 
himself until the bones peered through his shrunken skin, before I would 
deny the suflTerer the comfort of a daily morsel. Upon inquiry, I found 
that his story was true : that he was the only child of a bed-ridden mother, 
who, confined with rheumatism to a mat stretched on the earthen floor of 
a hovel in the suburb, had been unable to provide food for herself or 
her son for more than a month. Besides this, the urchin had sold the 
shoes and blanket we had given him to buy bread for his parent. 
He was a regular pensioner afterward, and his mother recovered. 
The last time I saw him was in the Alameda, to which he had crawled, 
saying that the "sunshine felt so comfortable, and that in its broad walks 
he did not suffer so much from the 'frios.' " 
For a long period, after this, I missed the urchin, and knew not what 
had become of him ; until one afternoon passing the wall of the convent 
of Santa Clara, I saw a man trotting along at ihe usual Indian gait, with 
a tray on his head which appeared to be covered with roses. Behind 
him was a ragged Upera, in teai s, with her long black hair hanging over 
her shoulders. As the man passed me, I looked into the tray and found 
it contained a corpse. It was that of a child who had died of consump- 
