Their faces are sad, and their manners very often singularly shame-
faced and awkward; and any careful observer would see at a glance
that these people were altogether unused to the craft of the trained
minstrel of the streets. Their clear, healthy complexion, though
often touched with pallor, their simple, unimportunate demeanour,
and the general rusticity of their appearance, shows them to be
"Suppliants who would blush
To wear a tatter'd garb, however coarse;
Whom famine cannot reconcile to filth;
Who ask with painful shyness, and refused,
Because deserving, silently retire."
The females, especially the younger ones, generally walk behind,
blushing and hiding themselves as much as possible. I have seen the
men sometimes walk backwards, with their faces towards those who
were advancing, as if ashamed of what they were doing. And thus they
went wailing through the busy streets, whilst the listening crowd
looks on them pityingly and wonderingly, as if they were so many
hungry shepherds from the mountains of Calabria. This flood of
strange minstrels partly drowned the slang melodies and the
monotonous strains of ordinary street musicians for a while.
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