Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/267

Rh clothes clean while traveling and were worn underneath while selling goods. These tricks are common property among roadsters, being the outcome of stern necessity. We soon learned that if a person looked as though he needed to sell his goods it was very hard to do so, but if he looked as though he was simply doing it for the pleasure of the thing it was very easy. By trying successively various ways of selling we soon became experts and could sell at nearly every house we tried.

Probably there exists nowhere a stranger medley of people than the inhabitants of that indefinite place known as "on the road." Their numbers are constantly lessened by desertion and as constantly augmented by fresh arrivals. As far as I could learn by personal inquiry, there are two classes of reasons which throw these persons on the road—one a subjective one, restlessness, and the other an objective one, misfortune.

As for the proportion between the two, my opinion would not carry much weight, as I was with these people only one summer, and hardly learned any more than that the proportion varies greatly. At the time I did not make any classified study of each person, although I learned as well as possible from personal conversation the causes of their condition. The cases which I can recollect now seem to be about evenly divided between those who go on the road from choice and those who do so from necessity. I have reason to believe, however, that this is not the normal proportion, those who had to travel being more numerous than usual. Whenever I found veterans I found them complaining of the great number of recruits. As one tramp expressed it, "It‘s gittin’ so a respectable ’boe [hoboe] can’t get a hand out anywhere no more. This whole d country is on the bum."

I. The class who are on the road from preference is by far the more complicated. Perhaps I could describe it better by dividing it into two subheads—the tramp and the roadster proper. With each of these two classes we had about equal experience. At different periods we could be classed with each; we traveled, ate, and slept with them and were received into their number. I will discuss them separately.

(a) —The first characteristic that strikes me as I recall my experience with them is their indefiniteness. Josiah Flynt, in his articles on tramps, has taken only the élite of the "profesh"—the tramp whose habits are born and bred into him and can hardly ever be entirely overcome. Besides these there is another class, last summer more numerous than the regular tramp, who would be placed on the border land of trampdom. They are traveling merely for the time being, and for the time being are no less distinctly tramps. They are men thrown out of work, who go on the road at first perhaps to find work. They get in