autboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I
believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in
'Henry IV'--

"'The case of a treble hautboy
Was a mansion for him, a court.'

"From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
used the terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap paralyzes
one--crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy,
becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one
understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and
musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!
The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man
without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically,
it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then,
as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick
cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is
wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn't it?"

And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in
my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me
with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my
best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
discriminating eye.

He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria's "Economic
Foundation of Society."

"I like to talk with you," he remarked. "You are not indifferently
schooled. You've read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it" (this with a sneer), "eminently fits
you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments
are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived
it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it,
the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
passage. Listen!"

And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved