e to recover from lifelong respectability, to the end that
she should become a merry beggar, gathering pennies while Father piped
upon that antic instrument, the mouth-organ.

Father labored with her, and cooked beans for her. She made him agree to
get as far from New York as their nine dollars would take them before
they should begin to be vagrants. It's always easier to be a bold
adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are.

The train took them about eighty miles into New Jersey. They debouched
rather shyly, and stood on the station platform in a town consisting of
a trust, a saloon, a druggist's, and a general store. The station
loafers stared at them. Father would no more have dared play the
mouth-organ to these gangling youths than he would have dared kiss a
traffic policeman at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue.

They edged around the corner of the station and gingerly stepped off
into an ocean of slush, deaf to the yells of the bus-driver who
hopefully represented that he would take them practically anywhere in
the world for fifty cents.

They were an odd couple. Father had no need of an overcoat, now. He was
wearing three shirts, two waistcoats, two pairs of trousers, and three
pairs of socks, to say nothing of certain pages of an evening newspaper
cunningly distributed through his garments, crackly but warm. He waddled
chubbily and somewhat stiffly, but he outfaced the winter wind as he had
not done for many weeks. In this outfit he could never have gone the
rounds of offices looking for work, but in the open he had the
appearance of a hardy woodsman--or at least the father of a woodsman. He
wore defiantly the romantic wreck of that plaid cap which he had bought
for Cape Cod, which his daughter had sequestered at Saserkopee, and
which he had stolen back from her. Also he had a secret joy in the fact
that his shirt--that is, his outer and most visible shirt--was a coarse
garment of blue flannel, a very virile and knightly tabard with large
white buttons, which Mother had never let him wear in public. It was
such a noble habiliment as a fireman might have worn, or a longshoreman,
or Dan'l Boone.

Mother was almost equally bulky, with an unassayed number of garments,
but over them all she wore a still respectable Raglan town coat.

They both carried bundles, and in Father's right hand was a red
pasteboard case which protected the mouth-organ. This, as they modestly
trotted through the village, he