is a man who is either a Spaniard or a Scotchman. Probably a
Spaniard, since he wears the dress of a Spanish goatherd and seems at
home in the Sierra Nevada, but very like a Scotchman for all that. In
the hollow, on the slope leading to the quarry-cave, are about a dozen
men who, as they recline at their cave round a heap of smouldering white
ashes of dead leaf and brushwood, have an air of being conscious of
themselves as picturesque scoundrels honoring the Sierra by using it as
an effective pictorial background. As a matter of artistic fact they are
not picturesque; and the mountains tolerate them as lions tolerate lice.
An English policeman or Poor Law Guardian would recognize them as a
selected band of tramps and ablebodied paupers.

This description of them is not wholly contemptuous. Whoever has
intelligently observed the tramp, or visited the ablebodied ward of a
workhouse, will admit that our social failures are not all drunkards and
weaklings. Some of them are men who do not fit the class they were born
into. Precisely the same qualities that make the educated gentleman an
artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an ablebodied pauper. There
are men who fall helplessly into the workhouse because they are good
far nothing; but there are also men who are there because they are
strongminded enough to disregard the social convention (obviously not a
disinterested one on the part of the ratepayer) which bids a man live
by heavy and badly paid drudgery when he has the alternative of walking
into the workhouse, announcing himself as a destitute person, and
legally compelling the Guardians to feed, clothe and house him better
than he could feed, clothe and house himself without great exertion.
When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker's office,
and starves in a garret, spunging on a poor landlady or on his friends
and relatives rather than work against his grain; or when a lady,
because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence
rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large
allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper and his
nomadic variant the tramp are equally entitled.

Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him,
must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends
itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no
such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when