The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tramping on Life, by Harry Kemp

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Title: Tramping on Life
An Autobiographical Narrative

Author: Harry Kemp

Release Date: March 19, 2005 [EBook #15415]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: THE AUTHOR OF _Tramping on Life_]

TRAMPING ON LIFE

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

HARRY KEMP

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.

_Copyright, 1922, by_

BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.

First Printing, September, 1922

Second Printing, November, 1922

Third Printing, January, 1923

Fourth Printing, April, 1923

Fifth Printing, July, 1923

Sixth Printing, September, 1923

Seventh Printing, November, 1923

Eighth Printing, May, 1924

Ninth Printing, November, 1924

Tenth Printing, July, 1925

Eleventh Printing, March, 1926

Twelfth Printing, February, 1927

_Printed in the United States of America_

All in this book that is good and enduring
and worth while for humanity, I
dedicate to the memory of my wife,

MARY PYNE

_Waterbury, Connecticut,
May 20, 1922._

TRAMPING ON LIFE

Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.

* * * * *

I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.

* * * * *

They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
Street, and, she girl-like, l