is future movements and plans, invited each to come
again to the Refuge if he chanced to be in those parts, shook each by a
heavy, reluctant hand, and bade each a good-by. Then the five slouched
out and away, leaving the town by back streets and byways; each with his
hat pulled down over his brows; each ten thousand times more humiliated,
ten thousand times more debased in his cleanliness, in his good clothes,
and with money in his pocket, than he had been in his dirt, his tatters,
his poverty.

They never came back to East Haven again.

The capacity of the Refuge was 50. In May there were 47 inmates, and
Colonel Singelsby began to apprehend the predicted overflow. The
overflow never came. In June there were 45 inmates; in July there were
27; in August there were 28; in September, 10; in October, 2; in
November, 1; in December there were none. The fall was very cold and
wet, and maybe that had something to do with the sudden falling off of
guests, for the tramp is not fond of cold weather. But even granting
that bad weather had something to do with the matter, the Refuge was
nevertheless a phenomenal, an extraordinary success--but upon very
different lines than Colonel Singelsby had anticipated; for even in this
the first season of the institution the tramps began to shun East Haven
even more sedulously than they had before cultivated its hospitality.
Even West Hampstead, where vagrancy was punished only less severely than
petty larceny, was not so shunned as East Haven with the horrid comforts
of its Refuge.

III.

As was said, the records of the Refuge showed that one inmate still
lingered in the sheltering arms of that institution during a part of
the month of November. That one was Sandy Graff.

Sandy Graff did not strictly belong to the great peregrinating leisure
class for whose benefit the Refuge had been more especially founded and
built. Those were strangers to the town, and came and went apparently
without cause for coming and going. Little or nothing was known of
such--of their name, of their life, of whence they came or whither their
footsteps led. But with Sandy Graff it was different; he belonged
identically to the place, and all the town knew him, the sinister
tragedy of his history, and all the why and wherefore that led to his
becoming the poor miserable drunken outcast--the town "bummer"--that he
was.

There is something bitterly enough pathetic in the profound abasement of
the common tramp--