Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a quarter to this one-armed man by the behavior of another one-armed man whom I befriended. I did give him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but because I had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. The gift seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe-store, where I had only one boot on, in the process of trying a pair, and I was quite helpless against him when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, and asked my name, apparently that he might pray for me without making a mistake in the address; and when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or a mean fear that he might find me out at home and come again to beg of me, that I would take the chance of the answer of his prayers getting to me, he told me all about the railroad accident that lost him his arm; and not content with this, he took his poor stump--as if to prove that it was real--and rubbed it over me, and blessed me and blessed me again, till I was quite ashamed of getting so much more than my money’s worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful man was not entirely sober? X. I dare say poverty and the pangs of hunger and cold do not foster habits of strict temperance. It is a great pity they do not, since they are so common. If they did, they could do more than anything else to advance the cause of prohibition. Still, I will not say that all the poor I give to are in liquor at the moment, or that drunkenness is peculiarly the vice of one-armed destitution. Neither is gratitude a very common or articulate emotion in my beneficiaries. They are mostly, if thankful at all, silently thankful; and I find this in better taste. I do not believe that as a rule they are very imaginative, or at least so imaginative as romantic novelists. Yet there was one sufferer came up the back elevator on a certain evening not long ago, and burst upon me suddenly, somehow as if he had come up through a trap in the stage, who seemed to have rather a gift in that way. He was most amusingly shabby and dirty (though I do not know why shabbiness and dirt should be amusing), with a cutaway coat worn down to its ultimate gloss, a frayed neckcloth, and the very foulest collar I can remember seeing. But he had a brisk and pleasing address, and I must say an excellent diction. He called me by name, and at once said that friends whom he had expected to find in New York were most inopportunely in Europe at this moment of his arrival from a protracted sojourn in the West. But he was very anxious to get on that night to Hartford, and complete his journey home from Denver, where he had fallen a prey to the hard times in the very hour of the most prosperous speculation; and he proposed, as an inducement to a loan, borrowing only enough money to take him to New Haven by the boat--he would walk the rest of the way to Hartford. I no more believed him than I should believe a ghost if it said it was a ghost.