Did you ever see a tramp tramping by and pausing at your door to beg a benediction—not of love, but of bread? What cared this wandering boy for love? His heart was in the grave; he was the “somnambulist of a shattered dream;” he was a romance in rags, a seedy poem, a tattered song, crumpled by the hand of fate and thrown into the waste-basket of oblivion.
He halted at a farmhouse one rainy day and proposed to kill all the rats on the place for his dinner. “Very well,” said the farmer, “it’s a bargain.” He called his neighbors in to see the killing. The tramp ate for an hour, and when he had finished he called for a spade. Seating himself in the middle of the room, he raised the spade over his shoulder and shouted: “Now fetch on your rats!”
He stopped at an old fellow’s door and told him he was a dentist, and smilingly proposed to put a good set of teeth in a fresh apple pie for nothing.
I saw love enter the gubernatorial door to plead for love one day, and the old mother sat and wept in the presence of the Governor, while the aged father told the story of a love that was wrecked long ago, a life that was ruined, and a lover that wandered away with the death wound in his heart. Then I heard him tell the story of a tramp whose journey had ended at last within the prison walls; and I went out with them and stood at the gate of hell. I looked in and saw the ghastly stripes of shame and the pallid faces of crime moving to and fro, laboring under the lash of justice and shrinking from the scorn of their fellow man. I entered and looked again; there was not a smile nor a single peal of laughter, but melancholy’s ghost of song still lingered behind the iron bars to comfort languishing love.
I saw children of tender age in that vortex of living death, and I said, “Hell was not made for children;” and I dragged them out and delivered them to their mothers. I saw youths who had committed crime in the heat of passion, dying in disgrace, and I dragged them out and sent them home, some with a new hope and some to die. I saw repentant men who had suffered long enough, and I dragged them out and gave them to their wives and their children. I saw the erstwhile tramp, the romance in rags, the tattered song, now the striped doxology of a misspent life; two trembling hands pointed to him. I turned to the old folks and said: “His crime was not great, and you are old and feeble;” and I dragged him out and left them weeping upon his bosom.
An overbearing lawyer once shouted to an old lady whom he was examining on the witness stand:
“Madam, please confine yourself to the facts!”