RUM-BLOSSOMED BEINGS,
ever give a thought as to how these miserables live. Where did they come from? Where are they going to? How do they get their food, and above all, where do they rest at night? Such questions as these never bother the brains of the gay gentlemen and ladies fair who when out for a walk meet these bedraggled wights. They see them and turn away in disgust. Even the ladies bountiful who (to their honor be it said) have their own pet charitable institutions, know them not; they also, like the priest and the Levite, pass them by. These objects that you meet, ladies and gentlemen, are mostly professional tramps, and a most uncanny tribe they are. A great many of them have seen better days, but misfortune, disappointments, blighted hopes, and above all an overwhelming craving for alcoholic stimulants, fostered in their palmy days, perhaps by champagne, Hockhiemer, and Moselle, but now only satisfied by the soul-corroding whiskey which they love, has brought them down to their present condition. Many of them, however, are born vagabonds, who have been “constitutionally tired” since their infancy. Some of them have trades, which they are too lazy to work at, even if their whisky-shattered nerves would allow them; but they are too far gone now to attempt anything in the shape of industry. Besides, what mechanic or tradesman would hire them? They are in rags and filthy, and an unholy and pungent atmosphere, suggestive of an ancient distillery, pervades their surroundings. These aromatic gentry, as I before stated, are tramps, proper, pure, and simple. The nomadic harbingers and epitomes of all that is squalid, wretched, and poverty-stricken in the land. Hopeless, hungry, and miserable, they tramp on their weary way, friendless, forgotten, and unknown until, upon the mattrass of some jail hospital, or out in the fields beneath the stars, they breathe their last and take their final tramp.
I have given you a picture of the ordinary tramp, who overruns the continent from Collingwood to Galveston, from Portland to San Francisco, and is merely an ill-omened bird of passage, as in contradistinction to our