A Handy Guide for Beggars: Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity / Being Sundry Explorations, Made While Afoot and Penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These Adventures Convey and Illustrate the Rules of Beggary for Poets and Some Others.

by Vachel Lindsay

The iron folk, the pioneers free-born.

Make me to voice the tall men in the corn.

Let boyhood’s wildflower days a bright fruit yield.

Scourge me, a slave that brings unhallowed praise

To you, stern Virgin in this church so sweet

If I desert the ways wherein my feet

Were set by Heaven, in prenatal days.

THE OLD GENTLEMAN WITH THE
LANTERN (AND THE PEOPLE OF
HIS HOUSEHOLD)

I
The Savage Necklace

The reader need not expect this book to contain any nicely adjusted plot with a villain, hero, lawyer, papers, surprise, and happy ending. The highway is irrelevant. The highway is slipshod. The highway is as the necklace of a gipsy or an Indian, a savage string of pebbles and precious stones, no two alike, with an occasional trumpery suspender button or peach seed. Every diamond is in the rough.