My Life

From a photograph taken in 1894
Author of Tramping with Tramps, The World of Graft, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED
I dedicate this book to all those human beings, who, like myself, have come under the spell of that will-o'-the-wisp, Die Ferne , the disappearing and fading Beyond, and who, like myself again, are doomed sooner or later to see the folly of their quest, Die Ferne receding meanwhile farther and farther away from their vision. It is the way of the World, says the Philosopher. That my fellow dupes in the fruitless chase may all become sweet-natured philosophers in the end, is my earnest wish and prayer.

It seems a long time since the day when Josiah Flynt came to me in the Temple, with a letter of introduction from his sister, whom I had met at the house of friends in London. The contrast was startling. I saw a little, thin, white, shriveled creature, with determined eyes and tight lips, taciturn and self-composed, quietly restless; he was eying me critically, as I thought, out of a face prepared for disguises, yet with a strangely personal life looking out, ambiguously enough, from underneath. He spoke a hybrid speech; he was not interested apparently in anything that interested me. I had never met any one of the sort before, but I found myself almost instantly accepting him as one of the people who were to mean something to me. There are those people in life, and the others; the others do not matter.
The people who knew me wondered, I think, at my liking Flynt; his friends, I doubt not, wondered that he could get on with me. With all our superficial unlikeness, something within us insisted on our being comrades. We found out the points at which undercurrents in us flowed together. Where I had dipped, he had plunged, and that aim, which I was expressing about then, to roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless, and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing, had been achieved by him. I was ready for just such a companion, hesitating on the edge of a road which he had traveled.