n the first place I told the old lady who rented me my room that I
could not pay her until I got work, and I gave her my blankets as
security. There remained only the problem of food. This I solved by
buying every day or so five cents' worth of stale bread, which I ate in
my room, washing it down with pure spring water. A little imagination
and lo! my bread was beef, my water wine. Thus breakfast and dinner. For
supper there was the Pacific Gospel Hall, where we gathered nightly one
hundred strong, bawled hymns, listened to sundry good people and
presently were given mugs of coffee and chunks of bread. How good the
fragrant coffee tasted and how sweet the fresh bread!

At the end of the third week I got work as an orange-picker. It was a
matter of swinging long ladders into fruit-flaunting trees, of sunshiny
days and fluttering leaves, of golden branches plundered, and boxes
filled from sagging sacks. There is no more ideal occupation. I revelled
in it. The others were Mexicans; I was "El Gringo." But on an average I
only made fifty cents a day. On one day, when the fruit was unusually
large, I made seventy cents.

Possibly I would have gone on, contentedly enough, perched on a ladder,
high up in the sunlit sway of treetops, had not the work come to an end.
I had been something of a financier on a picayune scale, and when I
counted my savings and found that I had four hundred and ninety-five
cents, such a feeling of affluence came over me that I resolved to
gratify my taste for travel. Accordingly I purchased a ticket for San
Diego, and once more found myself southward bound.

CHAPTER IX

A few days in San Diego reduced my small capital to the vanishing point,
yet it was with a light heart I turned north again and took the All-Tie
route for Los Angeles. If one of the alluring conditions of a walking
tour is not to be overburdened with cash surely I fulfilled it, for I
was absolutely penniless. The Lord looks after his children, said I, and
when I became too inexorably hungry I asked for bread, emphasising my
willingness to do a stunt on the woodpile. Perhaps it was because I was
young and notably a novice in vagrancy, but people were very good to me.

The railway track skirts the ocean side for many a sonorous league. The
mile-long waves roll in majestically, as straight as if drawn with a
ruler, and crash in thunder on the sandy beach. There were glorious
sunsets and weird storms, with underhanded lightning