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The Prelude.

“Twenty-nine dollars! Very well, Mr. John Redfield: I think you have cut your allowance a little low. With bracelets, bonbons, and other gewgaws for your interesting friends, I must say your enjoyment of this prospective Twenty-fifth of December is somewhat reduced. When a man has skated over the frozen surface of society a little matter of one-and-thirty years, it is just reasonable to hope he has reached that desideratum known as years of discretion. There is a little adage relating to the immeasurably short time the feeble-minded enjoy pecuniary advantages, which I think decidedly applicable to you.

“A rather severe epigram, occurring in the Holy Scriptures, goes to show the impossibility–even though the somewhat unsatisfactory argument of the pestle and mortar be resorted to–of separating the same class of people from their rather confused ideas of the fitness of things. However, when the Mussulman, careering over Sahara, finds himself, by a stumble of his horse, rolling in the sand, with his yataghan, pistols, and turban scattered around him, he rises quietly, and exclaims, ‘Allah is great!’ I know a Christian would have expended his wrath in a variety of anathemas highly edifying, and close by wishing his unfortunate steed in a much warmer climate than the Mohammedan has any idea of. I am a poor church-man: let me emulate the philosophy of the simple child of the desert, and when I fall into trouble bear it patiently.

“I wonder what the grim savage would do were he short of money in a land thronging with beggars and other blissful adjuncts of civilization? Woe unto every blind or club-foot man, and every one-armed or scalded woman, I meet to-day! They shall work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, or I’m an idiot.

“Why, bless my soul, the fortunes bequeathed to all the novel-heroes created this century, would not begin to supply them!”

Redfield shook his head decidedly when he came to this part of his monologue, and put the gold and silver coins back into his pocket.

“I hate poor people–I positively do! I despise their pale faces and cadaverous expression. I detest straggling little girls who come up to you and say their mothers have been bedridden for three months, and all their little brothers and sisters are down with the fever. I know it’s a lie. I can detect at once the professional whine, and am certain the story has been repeated by rote a hundred times that day; but for the life of me I cannot put out from my mind the imaginary picture of the half-furnished room in some filthy back street, with a forlorn woman with red hair stretched on a bed of straw, and half a dozen or more red-haired children piled about promiscuously.

“There is a wretched little German girl, always managing to have a boil either on her forehead or the back of her neck,–I believe in my soul it’s from overfeeding,–who follows my footsteps like a misanthropic vampire. By what ingenuity she manages to cajole me out of my money I know not, but I positively assert that in the last fortnight, according to her account, her unhappy mother has suffered from eleven different incurable diseases. My God! what a complication of misfortune! Why not let them starve? When a man is not capable of maintaining a family, why in Heaven’s name does he ever have one?

“I think I will follow the maxims of political economists and all respectable members of society, and vote beggars a nuisance. I wonder how many people to-day, praying for deliverance by Christ’s ‘agony and bloody sweat,’ by his ‘cross and passion,’ his ‘precious death and burial,’ his ‘glorious resurrection and ascension,’ and the ‘coming of the Holy Ghost,’ don’t?

“This is a charitable frame of mind to precede a Christmas morning. When did I contract the habit of talking to myself?