"Por el amor de Dios dame un centavo!"
("For the love of God give me a cent.") If you bestow it, he will
call on his patron saint to bless you. If you fail to assist him, the
curses of all the saints in heaven will fall on your impious head.
This often causes such a shudder in the recipient that I have known
him to turn back to appease the wrath of the mendicant, and receive
instead - a blessing.
It is not an uncommon sight to see a black-robed priest with his hand
on a boy's head giving him a benediction that he may be enabled to
sell his newspapers or lottery tickets with more celerity.
The National Lottery is a great institution, and hundreds keep
themselves poor buying tickets. In one year the lottery has realized
the sum of $3,409,143.57. The Government takes forty per cent. of
this, and divides the rest between a number of charitable and
religious organizations, all, needless to say, being Roman Catholic.
Amongst the names appear the following: Poor Sisters of St. Joseph,
Workshop of Our Lady, Sisters of St. Anthony, etc.
Little booths for the sale of lottery tickets are erected in the
vestibules of some of the churches, and the Government, in this way,
repays the church.
