The rain continued. An hour beyond, the road skirted the shore of Loch Katrine and stretched away across a desolate moorland. Fatigue drove away hunger and was in turn succeeded by a drowsiness in which my legs moved themselves mechanically, carrying me on through the dusk and into the darkness. It was past eleven when I splashed into Aberfoyle, too late to find an open shop in straight-laced Scotland, and, routing out a servant at a modest inn, I went supperless to bed. Months afterward, when I was in training for such undertakings, a forty-mile tramp left no evil effects; at this early stage of the journey the experience was not quickly forgotten.
The attraction of the open road was lacking when, late the next morning, I hobbled out into the streets of Aberfoyle, and, my round of sight-seeing over, I wandered down to the station and took train for Stirling. Long before the journey was ended, there appeared, far away across the valleys, that most rugged of Scotland’s landmarks, the castle of Stirling. Like the base of some giant pillar erected by nature and broken off by a mightier Sampson, it stands in solemn isolation in a vast, rolling plain, the very symbol of staunch independence and sturdy defiance.
My imagination far back in the days of Wallace and Bruce, I made my way up to the monument from the city below, half expecting, as I entered the ancient portal, to find myself surrounded by those bold and fiery warriors of past ages. And surely, there they were! That group of men in bonnets and kilts, gazing away across the parapets. Cautiously I approached them. What pleasure it would be to hear the old Scottish tongue and, perhaps, the story of some feud among the fierce clans of the Highlands! Suddenly one of the group strode away across the courtyard. As he passed me, he began to sing. A minstrel lay of ancient days, in the old Gaelic tongue? No, indeed. He had broken forth in the rasping voice of a Liverpool bootblack, juggling his H’s, as only a Liverpool bootblack can, in “The Good Old Summer Time.”
An hour afterward I faced the highway again, bound for Edinburgh. The route led hard by the battle-field of Bannockburn, to-day a stretch of waving wheat, distinguished from the surrounding meadows, that history does not know, only by the flag of Britain above it. With darkness I found lodging in a wheat field overlooking the broad thoroughfare.
The next day was Sunday and the weather calorific. For all that, the highroad had its full quota of tramps. I passed the time of day with any number of these roadsters,—they call them “moochers” in the British Isles. Some were sauntering almost aimlessly along the shimmering route, others were stretched out at apathetic ease in shady glens carpeted with freshly-blossomed bluebells. The “moocher” is a being of far less activity and initiative than the American tramp. He is content to stroll a few miles each day, happy if he gleans a meager fare from the kindly disposed. He would no more think of “beating his way” on the railroads than of building an air-ship for his aimless and endless wanderings. It is always walk with him, day after day, week after week; and if, by chance, he hears of the swift travel by “blind-baggage” and the full meals that fall to his counterpart across the water, he stamps them at once “bloody lies.”
Women laborers in the linen-mills of Belfast, Ireland
S.S. Sardinian. “Lamps does a bit of painting above the temporary cattle-pens”
In stranger contrast to the American, the British tramp is quite apt to be a family man. As often as not he travels with a female companion whom he styles, within her hearing and apparently with her entire acquiescence, “me Moll” or “me heifer.” But whatever his stamping ground the tramp is essentially the same fellow the world over. Buoyant of spirits for all his pessimistic grumble, generous to a fault, he eyes the stranger with deep suspicion at the first greeting, as uncommunicative and noncommittal as a bivalve. Then a look, a gesture suggests the world-wide question, “On the road, Jack?” Answer it affirmatively and, though your fatherland be on the opposite side of the earth, he is ready forthwith to open his heart and to divide with you his last crust.