“One half the world knows not how the other half lives,” and for the matter of that doesn’t care. The “one half,” by which in all probability is meant the well-to-do portion of the community, neither know nor care how their impoverished “brothers and sisters” (dearly beloved of course) live, nor for the matter of that how they die. Reader, gentle, fair or otherwise, were you ever the unhappy possessor of that rather unnecessary article known as the “key of the street?” Have you been out visiting until the “wee sma’ hours,” and on returning to your lodgings found that you had left your latch-key at home, also your cash, and the dread of your irate landlady, to whom you probably are in arrears, prevents you from rousing the house up? You have no intimate friend to quarter yourself on, not sufficient money to pay for bed and breakfast at a first-class hotel (the only ones accessible at that hour)? If so, then you must per force make use of your key of the street, or, in other words, tramp the city the remainder of the night, or rather morning, until long after “Faint Aurora dawns.”
If, gentle reader, you have gone through this, to you, trying ordeal, you will readily comprehend some of the situations that I will try to describe in this paper. If not, I will endeavor to enlighten you as to the ways and means used in struggling or rather shambling through the world by those enfants trouves, known to the benevolent as, “homeless poor.”
I speak of their ways and means rather than manners and customs, which may be described as the midshipman wrote down in his journal, the “Manners and customs” of the Fiji Islanders: “Manners—None. Customs—Nasty.”
How many of the 100,000 and odd (and some of them are very odd) people of Toronto, who in their daily walks abroad, come across at intervals numbers of squalid, unkempt, ragged, and
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
LOCAL VAGABONDISTI,
who remain year in and year out in our midst; and it is of these miserables who have made Toronto their field of action, or rather inaction, that I wish particularly to speak. Go down, let us say, to the Market square, any day during the winter, or in the months of navigation to the Esplanade. Hovering around the doors of the omnipresent “saloon” they lounge, a motley crowd. Occasionally, if the weather is not too rainy or cold, they may be seen posing on the lee side of a corner house, smoking clay pipes of unknown age, or chewing black strap in meditative mood. But the grog shop is always their objective point, and they seldom go far from its beery borders. Occasionally they invest the barroom to thaw themselves out in cold weather, and with a faint hope that someone will “set ’em up,” but they seldom stay long, for they know they are not wanted by the proprietor, who hesitates not to make them aware of the fact, and the seeker after spiritual comfort, after taking a long last, lingering look at the array of bottles, secures his overcoat upon him with its solitary button, and goes forth again into the cheerless streets.
These unfortunates eke out a miserable existence in the winter time by transferring dark diamonds from the carts to the household coal bins, shoveling snow and doing odd jobs of all sorts, by which they manage to get hold of a quarter or so, and on receipt of the same betake themselves to a grog shop, taking care to choose one where a layout of pulpy and scoriac liver, yellow ochre-like mustard, and stale bread form the menu of the free lunch. How on earth they manage to exist at all during the long winter would be a deep and perplexing mystery, were it not from the knowledge of the fact that there is such a place as “Castle Green” on the banks of the Don, where a great many of them pass the happy hours away under sentences from “the colonel.” In fact, too many of them. The jail is simply a harbor of refuge, to which they, by getting drunk or disorderly, can easily find their way, for notwithstanding the fact that these poor wretches have little comfort or enjoyment to look forward to in their hard journey of life, they prefer the cell and jail corridor, “skilly” and bread and water, and loss of liberty as well, to being half starved and in danger of freezing to death to the dignity of a few citizen.