Tramping on Life | Page 3

pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very
seldom, driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my
uncle Jim went East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later
on.
* * * * *
The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived
was looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring
furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of
strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in them,
and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of
tough kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang
used to fight.
After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the
"Hunkies" ... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
* * * * *
The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
scarce in the house.
I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay an
egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
* * * * *
My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean with
his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially after
the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom of
the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk vilely
with their spittle.
I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There was a
close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they attracted me.
For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging dresses. I liked the

pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of their cheeks.
It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
two, and two and two, four!
It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
month is now.
We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's
Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of Polar Explorations, Mungo
Park, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called Savage
Races of the World ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions in
turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways
where at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his
snout and overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey
to crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers ...
even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in Savage
Races of the World was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt
through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge feather-duster
of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as especially
romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing gloriously
through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some primitive
sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to have my
hair burning!
* * * * *
When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded

me endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a
full dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
Uncle Beck,