" And so she followed us almost all round the Abbey, assailing our
hearts in most plaintive terms, but with no success; for she did it far
too well to be anything but an impostor, and no doubt she had breakfasted
better, and was likely to have a better dinner, than ourselves. And yet
the natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beggars.
It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves
a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning
round, I told her that I should give her nothing,--with some asperity,
doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is
necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it
up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on
my first arrival from America.
Whether the beggar-woman had invoked curses on us, and Heaven saw fit to
grant some slight response, I know not, but it now began to rain on my
wife's velvet; so I put her and J----- into a cab, and hastened to
ensconce myself in Westminster Abbey while the shower should last.
Poets' Corner has never seemed like a strange place to me; it has been
familiar from the very first; at all events, I cannot now recollect the
previous conception, of which the reality has taken the place. I seem
always to have known that somewhat dim corner, with the bare brown
stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding down its light
on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three
walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet.
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