e is passed and gone, and East Haven rests with opulent ease,
subsisting upon the well-earned fruits of good work well done.

With all this fulness of completion one might think that East Haven had
attained the perfection of its ideal. But no. Still in one respect it is
like the rest of the world; still, like the rest of the world, it is
attainted by one great nameless sin, of which it, in part and parcel, is
somehow guilty, and from the contamination of which even it, with all
its perfection of law and government, is not free. Its boast that there
are no poor within its limits is true only in a certain particular
sense. There are, indeed, no poor resident, tax-paying, voting citizens,
but during certain seasons of the year there are, or were, plenty of
tramps, and they were not accounted when that boast was made.

East Haven has clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine
garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments
are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many
communities less clean--parasites that suck existence from God's gifts
to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East
Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; perhaps just
because its clothing of civilization was more soft and warm than theirs;
perhaps (and upon the face this latter is the more likely explanation of
the two) because, in a very exaltation of enlightenment, there were no
laws against vagrancy. Anyhow, however one might account for their
presence, there the tramps were. One saw the shabby, homeless waifs
everywhere--in the highways, in the byways. You saw them slouching past
the shady little common, with its smooth greensward, where well-dressed
young ladies and gentlemen played at lawn-tennis; you saw them standing
knocking at the doors of the fine old houses in Bay Street to beg for
food to eat; you saw them in the early morning on the steps of the old
North Church, combing their shaggy hair and beards with their fingers,
after their night's sleep on the old colonial gravestones under the
rustling elms; everywhere you saw them--heavy, sullen-browed, brutish--a
living reproach to the well-ordered, God-fearing community of something
cruelly wrong, something bitterly unjust, of which they, as well as the
rest of the world, were guilty, and of which God alone knew the remedy.

No town in the State suffered so much from their infestation, and it was
a co