BIDASSOA 230

ON A VOLCANIC PEAK 238

SHEEP AND SHEEP HERDING 244

RAILROAD WARS 256

AMERICAN SHIPMASTERS 263

TRAMPS 267

TEXAS ANIMALS 275

IN A SAILORS' HOME 282

THE GLORY OF THE MORNING 293

A Tramp's Note-Book

A WATCH-NIGHT SERVICE IN SAN FRANCISCO

How much bitter experience a man keeps to himself, let the experienced
say, for they only know. For my own part I am conscious that it rarely
occurs to me to mention some things which happened either in England or
out of it, and that if I do, it is only to pass them over casually as
mere facts that had no profound effect upon me. But the importance of
any hardship cannot be estimated at once; it has either psychological or
physiological sequelae, or both. The attack of malaria passes, but in
long years after it returns anew and devouring the red blood, it breaks
down a man's cheerfulness; a night in a miasmic forest may make him for
ever a slave in a dismal swamp of pessimism. It is so with starvation,
and all things physical. It is so with things mental, with
degradations, with desolation; the scars and more than scars remain:
there is outward healing, it may be, but we often flinch at mere
remembrance.

But time is the vehicle of philosophy; as the years pass we learn that
in all our misfortunes was something not without value. And what was of
worth grows more precious as our harsher memories fade. Then we may bear
to speak of the days in which we were more than outcasts; when we
recognised ourselves as such, and in strange calm and with a broken
spirit made no claim on Society. For this is to be an outcast indeed.

I came to San Francisco in the winter of 1885 and remained in that city
for some six months. What happened to me on broad lines I have written
in the last chapter of _The Western Avernus_. But nowadays I know that
in that chapter I have told nothing. It is a bare recital of events with
no more than indications of deeper miseries, and some day it may chance
to be rewritten in full. That I was of poor health was nothing, that I
could obtain no employment was little, that I came to depe