At The End Of A Fagging Day, The Sharp, Cruel Note Of A Dog's Bark Is In Itself A Keen Annoyance; And To A Tramp Like Myself, He Represents The Sedentary And Respectable World In Its Most Hostile Form.

There is something of the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and if he were not amenable

To stones, the boldest man would shrink from traveling a-foot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them."

I confess to a feeling of sympathy with the men we so indiscriminately brand with the contemptuous epithet, "hobo." In the first place, the road itself, with its accompanying humors and adventures, forms a mutual and efficacious bond. How little we know of the "Knights of the Road," or the compelling circumstances that turned them adrift upon the world! "All sorts and conditions of men" are represented, from the college professor to the ex-pugilist. I have "hit the ties" in company with a so-called "hobo" who quoted Milton and Shakespeare by the yard, interspersed with exclamations appreciative of his enjoyment of the country through which we were passing. And once when on a tramp along the coast from San Francisco to Monterey, I fell in at Point San Pedro with a professional, who bitterly regretted the coming of the Ocean Shore Railway, then in process of construction. "For years," said he, "I have been in the habit of making this trip at regular intervals, on my way south.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 66 of 77
Words from 17346 to 17605 of 20479