TRAMPS 125 



and taste the pleasures that tempt men to filibustering 

 without any of their accompanying dangers without 

 appreciable dangers at least. Of course if the law 

 chanced to lay its clutches upon you, and further to 

 take unhandsome advantage of your doubtful ante- 

 cedents, your summer plans might be unhappily marred, 

 and you might be forced into disagreeable exertion in 

 the holidays. But if the tramp lets himself be caught, 

 he must in fairness confess he deserves all the disagree- 

 ables in store for him. Reinvigorated with meat and 

 drink, with wallet replenished as well as the knot in his 

 necktie that serves for portemonnaie, his footsoreness 

 cured by enchantment, he strides away full four miles 

 an hour into space, and busy men working against 

 time to secure their crops are scarcely likely to lay 

 themselves down on his impalpable trail. Then with 

 the evening comes the jovial orgy, the social cup, the 

 unclean song, the stimulating slanging match, and the 

 pleasant fight, at long odds, where foul blows are freely 

 exchanged, and the victors literally trample on the 

 fallen. 



In England the winter comes hard upon the profes- 

 sional tramp. But it is not his habit to take thought 

 for the morrow, and moreover experience tells him 

 that he can somehow tide through the cold. So far as 

 he is concerned our much-abused weather has a worse 

 name than it deserves. Wet he has got well accus- 

 tomed to, and severe snowstorms and prolonged frosts 

 are become the exceptions rather than the rule. Be- 

 sides, if the worst comes to the worst, he can fall back 



