e 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. I had the road to myself and thoroughly enjoyed the peaceful
beauty of the scene; but now this railroad has come with its mushroom
towns, and all the charm has gone. Never again for me! This is my last
trip!"

I have not the slightest doubt that sheer love of the road--and only a
tramp knows what those words mean--is the controlling influence which
keeps fifty per cent of the fraternity its willing slaves. What was
Senhouse--that most fascinating of Maurice Hewlett's creations--but a
tramp? A gentleman tramp, if you please, but still a tramp. What is
the reason that Senhouse appeals so strongly to the imagination? Simply
because he loved Nature. And in this matter-of-fact period when poetry
is dead and even a by-word, the man who loves Nature, if not a poet, at
least has poetry in his soul. In a decadent age symbolized by the tango
and the problem play, it is at least an encouraging sign for the future
that such a character as Senhouse came to the jaded reader of the erotic
fiction of the day, as a whiff of sea breeze on a parched plain, and was
hailed with corresponding delight.

Of course there are "hoboes" and "hoboes," as in any other profession,
but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many
reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the
shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and
materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road
has eased him of his burden and made him a philosopher.

Thoreau, writing in the middle of the last century, deplores the fact
that in his day, as now, but few of his countrymen took any pleasure
in walking, and that very rarely one encountered a person with any real
appreciation of the beauty of Nature, which if he could but see it, lay
at his very door. Speaking for himself and companion in his rambles,
he says: "We have felt that we almost alo