I said: "How can you tell?"
"By your hand-shake and the cut of your phiz."
And throughout the trip he continued to regard me as a species of bogy-man, while Ryborg he considered a most reputable traveler. So he was and is; but he made some of his most criminal faces on that same voyage, nevertheless. One of them, I particularly remember, seemed to say, "I can't eat, can't sleep, can't do anything"; and his under lip would fall in a most genuine manner. He was often eloquent in his representations of my ability to pose as a tramp; but I am sure that nothing I can do would so quickly throw even the vigilant off the track as that face of my companion.
We went into Scotland without any prejudice; but we had scarcely been in Edinburgh three hours when an English roadster tried to make me believe terrible things of the "Scotties," as he called the Scotch tramps. "The Scotties are good enough to mooch with," said he, "an' ain't bad people in some ways till they're drunk; an' then they're enough to make a cat sick. Why, Yank, they can't talk about anything then but Bobbie Burns. It's Bobbie did this, an' Bobbie did that, till you'd think the sun didn't rise an' set on anybody else. I wish the feller hadn't ever lived." The poor man had evidently never read Bobbie's "Jolly Beggars"; for if he had he would have long since made a pilgrimage to Ayr.
Edinburgh can almost be reckoned as one of the best mooching towns in Great Britain, and if I were a beggar casting about for a life-residence, I think I should select this beautiful city, and that from my own personal experience. There is something deliriously credulous in the true citizen, and the university makes it a specially good place for clothes. Our first meal in the town we found at a "refuge" in High Street. We paid a penny apiece for a quart of good thick soup and half a loaf of bread. It was the largest quantity of food I have ever had for so little money; but it should be remembered that it was a charity. Cheap-restaurant living, in both Scotland and England, is more of a theory than a reality. For twopence I have had a dinner at a Herberge in Germany that I could not get in Great Britain for five; and for ten cents I have had table d'hôte with four courses in Chicago that I could not get in London for a shilling.
The cheapest restaurants that I know of in the United Kingdom are the cocoa-rooms; but a tramp can live three times as cheaply in the kip-house, if he cooks his own food. Tramps fully realize this, and it is seldom that they go near a cocoa-room. One old moocher said to me, when I questioned him on the subject, "I've been in them places time and again, but I never get my stomach's worth in them"—a statement to which I can add my own similar testimony.
When traveling from Edinburgh to Glasgow, the tramp has two routes—one by way of Bathgate, the other by way of Linlithgow. Neither of them is a good begging highway. The people along the road are, as the German tramp would say, ausgepumpt. Nevertheless, it must be traveled afoot, for railway fares in Great Britain are much too high for the beggar's purse.
Ryborg and I determined this time to separate, he going through Bathgate, and I by way of Linlithgow. In this way we covered more ground, and at the same time Ryborg had the desired opportunity to play the tramp alone. His argument for the experiment ran in this wise: "To save my life, I don't seem to be able to talk with these beggars more than two minutes at a time, and I'm really afraid that I am spoiling your scheme. You see, if they discover that I am not what I pretend to be, our work is in danger; so I'll try this trip alone, and see if I can't get a little more into the tramp spirit." We promised to find each other in front of the general post-office in Glasgow.
On the whole journey I found but one interesting moocher, and that a moocheress. She traveled my way for about two hours, and as she smoked my cigarettes she gave me a little of her biography. She had lived just fifty years, did not know when she entered trampdom, had no recollection of her parents, and believed mainly in "booze," as she called it. She prided herself on being a fighting woman, as do a great many of the English Judies.
"Why, I'm a reg'lar Charley Mitchell," said she, "when I want to be."