In America it is as well to carry travelers’ checks, as they can be cashed even in a small village, and they are safer than notes. In Europe such checks are difficult to cash except in large cities. They are unfamiliar to the bankers of provincial towns. Even in large towns you may have to wander from bank to bank seeking a correspondent of the original bank from which you have taken the traveler’s check.
A good plan is to have five-pound notes sent to you by registered post by a bank at the time at which you are likely to require them. They can be sent poste restante, but it is unwise to leave the packet too long unclaimed, as in some countries they send back letters to sender after a week. Money can be sent by wire in this way. Money can also be sent by a bank in response to a wire if you have arranged a code signature before leaving home. This is a very simple matter if you are bad enough tramp to have a balance intact.
After two months, or less, in the open, living the life of a tramping hermit, you are likely, upon occasion, to have a joyous reaction towards excess. And this may express itself in a gay and giddy week-end, in hotels and restaurants and places of music and dance. You may spend more on a romp than you do on the tramp. Round and round the market place the monkey chased the weasel! You are that monkey never catching that weasel. That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel!
Oh, that weasel, that weasel of false heart’s desire! Haven’t we chased it upon occasion!
I am Memory and Torment, I am Town,
I am all that ever went with evening dress!
Thus sang the banjo in the wilderness. You lie in the heights of the mountain under the stars, with empty pockets and empty stomach, and you look at the many lights, the blent illumination of the Milky Way, and think—of Broadway, the Great White Way, burning its great stream of electricity, burning your candle and its own.
The spree is not, however, entirely legitimate to the tramping expedition. Tramping is first of all a rebellion against housekeeping and daily and monthly accounts. You may escape from the spending mania, but first of all you escape from the inhibition, that is the word, the inhibition of needing to earn a living. In tramping you are not earning a living, but earning a happiness.
There was a verse of poetry of which Ruskin, in his satirical mood, was inordinately fond:
As for the bird in the thicket,