heir habits all set out
for them. But the hobo, who has to ride the rods amid flying gravel
to-day, and has to coax food out of a nice old lady to-morrow, must have
an expert working knowledge of psychology if he is to climb in his
arduous profession.

Father and Mother had started out from New York on a desperate flight,
with no aspirations beyond the hope that they might be able to make a
living. It was the hobo, Crook McKusick, who taught Father that there
was no reason why, with his outdoor life and his broadened experience,
he should not be a leader among men wherever he went; be an Edward
Pilkings and a Miss Mitchin, yea, even a Mrs. Lulu Hartwig, instead of a
meek, obedient, little Seth Appleby. It was Crook who, out of his own
experience in doing the unusual, taught Father that it was just as easy
to be unusual, to live a life excitedly free, as to be a shop-bound
clerk. Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at
a time, keeping at it, forming the habit.... So, an outcast among
outcasts, grubbily bunked in a camp of hoboes, talking to a filthy lean
man with an evil hooked nose, Seth Appleby began to think for himself,
to the end that he should be one of the class that rules and is
unafraid.

The amiable boarders at Hoboes' Home didn't at all mind Mother's darning
their socks. They didn't much mind having her order them to wash their
faces at a hole through the ice in the near-by creek before coming to
dinner. But it took her many days to get them used to going off to work
for money and supplies. Yet every day half the camp grumblingly
disappeared to shuck corn, mend fences, repair machinery, and they came
back with flour, potatoes, meat, coffee, torn magazines, and shirts.
Father regularly went out to work with them, and was the first to bring
water, to cut wood. They all took a pride in the camp. They kept the
bunk-house scrubbed, and inordinately admired the new mattresses,
stuffed with fresh straw and covered with new calico, which Mother made
for them. In the evenings the group about the camp-fire was not so very
different from any other happy family--except that there was an
unusually large proportion of bright eyes and tanned faces.

But when spring cleared the snow away, made the bare patches of earth
quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks
overhead--vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about
the fire--there was no sorrow in the