looked hard and I watched
closet and I never found it. They is many kinds of hobos and tramps,
perfessional and amachure, and lots of kinds of bums, and lots of young
fellers working their way around to see things, like I was, and lots of
working men in hard luck going from place to place, and all them kinds
is humans. But the real yeggman ain't even a dog.

And oncet I went all the way from Chicago to Baltimore with a serious,
dern fool that said he was a soshyologest, whatever them is, and was
going to put her all into a book about the criminal classes. He worked
hard trying to get at the reason I was a hobo. Which they wasn't no
reason, fur I wasn't no hobo. But I didn't want to disappoint that
feller and spoil his book fur him. So I tells him things. Things not
overly truthful, but very full of crime. About a year afterward I was
into one of these here Andrew Carnegie lib'aries with the names of the
old-time presidents all chiselled along the top and I seen the hull
dern thing in print. He said of me the same thing I have said about them
yeggmen. If all he met joshed that feller the same as me, that book must
of been what you might call misleading in spots.

One morning I woke up in a good-sized town in Illinoise, not a hundred
miles from where I was raised, without no money, and my clothes not much
to look at, and no job. I had been with a railroad show fur about two
weeks, driving stakes and other rough work, and it had went off and left
me sleeping on the ground. Circuses never waits fur nothing nor cares a
dern fur no one. I tried all day around town fur to get some kind of a
job. But I was looking purty rough and I couldn't land nothing. Along in
the afternoon I was awful hungry.

I was feeling purty low down to have to ast fur a meal, but finally I
done it.

I dunno how I ever come to pick out such a swell-looking house, but I
makes a little talk at the back door and the Irish girl she says, "Come
in," and into the kitchen I goes.

"It's Minnesota you're working toward?" asts she, pouring me out a cup
of coffee.

She is thinking of the wheat harvest where they is thousands makes fur
every fall. But none of 'em fur me. That there country is full of them
Scandiluvian Swedes and Norwegians, and they gets into the field before
daylight and stays there so long the hired man's got to milk the cows by
moonlight.

"I been acrost the river into I'way," I says, "a-working at my trade,
and now I'm going back to