enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other extended,
implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The street-boys
also often perform the duties of the _gransieri_, who draw your
gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order of beggar I
usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had no soldi, and as I
did not wish to render my friend discontented with future alms by giving
silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to excuse me, and promising
him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty courtesy with which he
returned,--"_S'accomodi pur, Signor!_" They have sometimes a sense of
humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the exposure of their own
enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to land one evening when we
went too late to see the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The sacristan
made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we rewarded him as if it had
been noonday. On our return to the gondola, the same beggar whom we had
just feed held out his hat for another alms. "But we have just paid you,"
we cried in an agony of grief and desperation. _"Si, signori!"_ he
admitted with an air of argument, _"e vero. Ma, la chiesa!"_ (Yes,
gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he added with confidential
insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand toward the edifice, as if
he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the church as a source of
revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to scorn; at which,
beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he himself joined in our
laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.

Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to all
classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general and
shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if they
hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered man