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"Mother," said Adone, "here is a hungry child. Give her, in your kindness, some broth and bread." Clelia Alba came out into the entrance, and saw the little girl with some displeasure. She was kind and charitable, but she did not love beggars and vagabonds, and this half-naked female tatterdemalion offended her sense of decency and probity, and her pride of sex.

Isabel asked. "O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days, that I couldn't help it," he answered; and straightway in the eyes of both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.

Nothing more alien could come into the New England life than this tatterdemalion band.

I gave up my ticket and, since I had come off a northern train, walked unhindered into the town. It was market night, and the streets were crowded. Blue-jackets from the Fleet, country-folk in to shop, and every kind of military detail thronged the pavements. Fish-hawkers were crying their wares, and there was a tatterdemalion piper making the night hideous at a corner.

He came down the Club steps with me. By the door of my cab a loafer was standing; a tall tatterdemalion with a pale, bearded face. My distant relative fended him away, and leaning through the window, murmured: "Awful lot of these chaps about now!" For the life of me I could not help looking at him very straight. But no flicker of apprehension crossed his face.

Here were the "picturesque costumes!" This was the "gallant spectacle!" Tatterdemalion vagrants cheap braggadocio "Arabian mares" spined and necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like a dromedary!

And by this time 'twas night, and a little town at hand, where we went each to his inn; for my master would not yield to put off his rags and other sores till morning; nor I to enter an inn with a tatterdemalion. So we were to meet on the road at peep of day, and indeed, we still lodged apart, meeting at morn and parting at eve outside each town we lay at.

In the echoing enclosure of the forest walls the noise was prodigious. And then abruptly, as before, it fell. In the silence the voice of the old headman was heard: "Here will be found the way to the guest houses," he urged gently. The ragged safari, carrying its loads, plunged again into a forest path, walking single file, a tatterdemalion crew.

On the 28th of May he set out at the head of his tatterdemalion band from the village of Boughton, and proceeded to Fairbrook. Here a pole was procured, and a flag of white and blue, representing a rampant lion, was raised as the banner which was to lead them to victory.

Percival found Beck in the hall, already much altered, and embellished, by a new suit of livery. The ex-sweeper stared hard at Varney, who, without recognizing, in so smart a shape, the squalid tatterdemalion who had lighted him up the stairs to Mr. Grabman's apartments, passed him by into Percival's little study, on the ground-floor.