My Monks of Vagabondia

“He is a wonderful man,” said another.

At last all were convinced and the Moon-Struck-One, satisfied, arose rather abruptly, and went into the house.

A few days later he left the Colony to go to his relatives in a distant city, and so the boys had no one to play tricks upon, no one who was not their equal in wit.

It was some weeks afterwards that one of the young men said to me as we were talking out of doors in the evening:

“There is that light of Edison’s hanging over the trees.”

“Where?” I asked.

“That bright light over there that looks like a big star. The Witless One told us about it. In some ways he was really wiser than we gave him credit for.”

“That’s the Evening Star,” I said.

“It is what?” asked another boy.

“It is Venus, the Evening Star.”

“He told us it was put up there by Edison.”

“So it really isn’t an illuminated balloon?”

The boys looked from one to the other, then every one laughed loudly and long.

“Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘Answer a fool according to his folly?’” asked a boy.

“Yes, and it also says, ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.’”

IN THE WORLD OF WANDERLUST

“To stand in true relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?”

    – Emerson.

In the World of Wanderlust

The Spirit of the Wanderlust seizes all the World in the early days of Spring – the so-called hobo takes to the open road, the millionaire to his country home, each rejoices that the long imprisonment of winter is passed, for all men are akin in their love of freedom. It is a search for the ideal. With De Soto we would say, “Somewhere, if ye seek untiringly, ye shall discover and drinke of ye Fountaine of Youth and Happiness.”

“Men have said they do not understand my restless wanderings,” remarked Lakewood Tom. "Can it be they have never watched the coming of the first robin, and do not know that he ushers in the new regime of promise and prosperity?

"Other men may linger in the failing twilight of the tired day. I go to greet the rising sun. Even the very birds – little hoboes of the air, break camp cheerfully in early May. Like them I, too, take to the open road and walk by faith.

"But you, my lords, with your worldly goods, are vagabonds no less than I. Out of the inexhaustible larder of the Divine, God gives you – as it were – a crust of bread, and men call you mighty in riches. Take a vagabond’s advice, and put your mark upon the house where you found favor, lest after many years, disheartened, you pass that way again and need another ‘handout’ – maybe not a crust of bread, but, a more lasting gift – an ideal perchance, that may not fail so soon. Sometimes methinks it sad, there is given to man only the thing for which he asks.

“Adieu,” said Lakewood Tom, taking up his staff, “when the snow falls next year I may visit your Monastery again with your permission, if by happy chance I am on this earth. If not, I’ll meet you some Christmas day on the planet Mars, for I never forget a friend. Good cheer! Adieu.”

“Much privation has crazed the old man,” said a comrade who, with me, watched the old vagabond walking slowly down the drive.

“I do not know,” I said.

THE TWO JEANS

“To every man there come noble thoughts that pass across his heart like great white birds.”

    – Maeterlinck.

The Two Jeans

“It is always hard times on the Bowery,” my diminutive informant told me. He was a new comer to our Colony. He, in company with another young man, had made his appearance an hour or two before, but I had not been able to talk with him, except to assure him that he and his friend might remain with us one night, at least. “Yes, sir,” he continued, “without money a man is a dead one; even in this strange haunt of stranger men money is a daily need. Of course, some men who know the hidden ways can get along on as little as twenty cents a day, or less, but for myself I could not exist on less than thirty-five cents.”

The figures he mentioned seemed modest enough to me. “Couldn’t you earn that much?” I asked him.

“I am so small no one would hire me,” he replied. "I could get errands to do now and then. Of course, while my mother lived she kept a home for me, but after she died I did not know what to do. I only sat in the house day after day and looked out of the window. I could not make any plans for myself. You see when I was a baby I fell and injured my back. I didn’t grow much more after that accident. The doctors called it a curvature."

He laughed easily as he asked me, "You know the poem of James Whitcomb Riley,

‘I’m th’ust a little cripple boy
An’ never going to grow,
An’ git a great big man at all,
‘Cause auntie told me so.’

“I rather think I’m that boy. One time I chanced to find that poem and read it to my mother. She took the book from me in the gentle way she had, and then putting her arms around me, told me to be a good boy and everything would come out all right. But they never did come all right. Maybe I was not good enough; but this can’t interest you. You hear enough hard luck stories without mine.”

“If you wish to tell me,” I said, “I shall be quite glad to listen.”

“Well, it’s only this,” he continued. "Left to myself, I wasn’t smart enough to make a living. I can’t get my room rent and my lunch money all at the same time. If I have my lunches I have no room, and if I have a room I have nothing to eat."

He grew very serious. He could laugh at his misshapen back, make a jest at his deformity, but hunger – even at the thought of hunger – the smile left his face, the color fled from his lips.

“Are you faint?” I asked him quickly.

“No, I am a coward,” he said, “just a plain coward. You see, I am beaten and I know it.”

“You will be all right in a few days,” I said, “and be able to criticise the food as cheerfully as any other member of my Family.” I laughed gayly enough, but he did not laugh with me. “Have you and this boy been friends a long time? Where did you meet him?” I inquired.

“In the park, some weeks ago. He has no home either. He was sleeping out and so was I. He gave me part of a newspaper to put under me, as the ground was damp. So I tried to talk to him… He is good looking, isn’t he?”

I admitted it.

“Well, he’s a Russian dummy,” said the boy.

“He is what?” I asked.

“He just landed from Russia three months ago, and he knows very little about the English language. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what I have been talking to you about all this time. Night after night, not having any bed to sleep in, he has ‘flopped’ in the park or ‘carried the banner’ until morning.”

“So you brought him out with you?”