For some time after the departure of the French, the
distress was so general and so severe, that a large proportion of the
lower classes became mendicants, and one of the greatest
thoroughfares of Valetta still retains the name of the "Nix mangiare
stairs," from the crowd who used there to assail the ears of the
passengers with cries of "nix mangiare," or "nothing to eat," the
former word nix being the low German pronunciation of nichts,
nothing. By what means it was introduced into Malta, I know not; but
it became the common vehicle both of solicitation and refusal, the
Maltese thinking it an English word, and the English supposing it to
be Maltese. I often felt it as a pleasing remembrancer of the evil
day gone by, when a tribe of little children, quite naked, as is the
custom of that climate, and each with a pair of gold earrings in its
ears, and all fat and beautifully proportioned, would suddenly leave
their play, and, looking round to see that their parents were not in
sight, change their shouts of merriment for "nix mangiare," awkwardly
imitating the plaintive tones of mendicancy; while the white teeth in
their little swarthy faces gave a splendour to the happy and
confessing laugh with which they received the good-humoured rebuke or
refusal, and ran back to their former sport.
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