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SUNLIGHT 133
selfish spirit in which a poor man will accompany him
for a distance of five or ten miles to show him the way
through the mountains, and then disappear at once as
soon as his debtor moves his hand to his pocket. It
is not an infrequent thing for a poor woman to come
to the market-place in Granada and to say to a bag-
gage-carrier: “I have a box that I should like to have
taken to the station, but I have no money; God will
reward you for it.” And her box will be brought to
the station.
In Copenhagen we say: “The poorer the man, the
higher the price.” The most impoverished persons,
whose purchases amount to two or three farthings
each, pay as high as one hundred per cent more than
persons of better station. It pays to do business with
poverty. In Andalusia, no reduction is made for large
purchases. Any one who suggested such a thing to a
merchant would encounter the reply, as a rule: “It
would be a sin against the poor!’ And what is more,
when you make purchases on a very small scale you
are not subjected to the treacherous reduction in
quantity which seems to have become the rule in Den-
mark and which limits the poor to half their proper
nourishment.
“Tt isn’t so very bad to be poor,” said a poor widow
of Granada to me. “At seven o’clock in the morning
the milk goats go by. I buy two farthings’ worth of
milk then, and that means a glass filled to the brim.
It would cost any one else five farthings, but they can
see that I am poor. At eight o’clock God comes out
in all his glory and shines right into my room; so rich,
so rich, that I do not need to kindle my brazier. I can
hear my blood boil, so warm is the sun and—tra, la—
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