Vagabondism had already set its mark upon
me. I looked, so long and so earnestly, in at the
baker's window that the baker—a lean, spiky
Scotchman, whose name (McCorquodale, in
lean spiky letters above his shop-front) looked
like himself, appeared to think I was
meditating a bold border foray on his stock
in trade, and rushed at me so fiercely round
his counter with a bread-tin, that I fled like a
young gazelle. I plodded down the
Wandsworth road, blushing very much as I passed
people in clean shirts and well-brushed
clothes, and pretty servant-maids, dressed out
in ribbons like Maypoles, laughing and
chattering in the gardens and at the doors of
suburban villas. I had a dreadful qualm too,
on meeting a boarding school for young gentlemen
in full force, walking in procession two
and two. As I passed the master—a stout man
genteelly garotted in a white neckcloth, and
walking severely with the youngest pupil as
if he had him in custody—I shivered. Bolting
house and Mr. Bogryne loomed, for an
instant, not in the distance, but close upon
me. Good gracious! I thought—What if there
should be some masonic intercourse between
preceptors, relative to the recovery of
runaways; some scholastic hue-and-cry; some
telegraphic detection of chivying? But the
schoolmaster passed me in silence, merely
giving me a glance, and then glancing at his
boys, as if he would say, "See, young gentlemen,
the advantage of being boarded, washed,
and educated in an establishment where
moral suasion is combined with physical
development (Times, August 20). If ever you
neglect your use of the globes, or sneer at
your preceptors, or rebel at pies, you may
come, some day, to look like that." The last
and biggest boy, in a checked neckcloth and
a stand-up collar, as I made way for him on
the pavement, made a face at me. It was
so like the face I used to make at the ragged
little boys, when Bogryne's boys went out
walking, that I sat down on a dog's meat
vendor's barrow and cried again.

By some circuitous route which took me, I
think, over Wandsworth Common, and
through Roehampton and Putney, I got that
evening to Kingston-upon-Thames. The sun
was setting, as I leaned over the bridge. I
was tired and hungry; but, dismissing the
idea of supper, as something not sufficiently
within the range of possibility to be discussed,
I certainly began to feel anxious concerning
bed. Where or how was it to be? Was it
to be barn, or hay-rick, or outhouse—or
simply field, with the grass for a pillow, and
the sky for a counterpane? My thoughts
were interrupted by a stranger.

He was, like myself, a tramp; but, I think
I may say without vanity, he was infinitely
more hideous to look at. Short and squat and
squarely built, he had the neck of a bull and
the legs of a bandy tailor. His hands were
as the hands of a prizefighter. They were so
brown and horny that where the wrists joined
on to his arm you might fancy the
termination of a pair of leather gloves. His face
was burnt and tanned with exposure to sun
and rain to a dull brickdust colour; purple
red on the cheek-bones and tips of the nose and
chin. Both hands and face were inlaid with
a curious chequer work of dirt, warranted
to stand the most vigorous application of a
scrubbing-brush. His head was close cropped
like a blighted stubble-field, and his flabby
ears kept watch on either side of it like scarecrows.
He had pigs' eyes of no particular
colour; no eyebrows, no beard save a stubbly
mildew on his upper lip like the mildew
on a pot of paste, a "bashed" nose, and a
horrible hare-lip. He had an indefinite jacket
with some letters—a W, I think, and an I—
branded on one sleeve, a pair of doubtful
trousers, and something that was intended
for a shirt. None of these were ragged, nor
could they be called patched, for they were
one patch. Finally, he had a bundle in his
hand, a cap like a disc cut out of a door-mat
on his head, and something on his feet which
I took to be a pair of fawn-coloured slippers,
but which I subsequently found to be a
coating of hardened mud and dust upon his
skin.

He looked at me for a moment half curiously,
half menacingly; and then said, in a shrill
falsetto voice that threw me into a violent
perspiration:—

"Where wos you a going to?"

I replied, trembling, that I was going to bed.

"And where wos you a going to sleep?"
he asked.

I said I didn't know.

He stroked the mildew on his lip and spoke
again:—

"I s'pose now you'd be a young midshipmite?"

I am certain that I must have looked more
like a young sweep, but I contented myself
with saying that I did not belong to His
Majesty's service;—yet.

"What might you be a doing of, now?" he
demanded.

It was a dreadful peculiarity of this man
that when he spoke he scratched himself; and
that when he didn't speak he gave his body
an angular oscillatory wrench backwards and
forwards from the shoulder to the hip, as if
he had something to rasp between his jacket
and his skin; which there is no doubt he had.
I was so fearful and fascinated by his uncouth
gestures that he had to repeat his question
twice before I answered: then, not knowing
what to describe myself, (for I could not
even assume that most ambiguous of all
titles, a gentleman), I said, at hazard, that I
was a tailor.

"Where wos you a going to-morrow?"

I said, hesitatingly, to Portsmouth.

"Ah! to Portsmouth," resumed the man,
"to Portsmouth, surely! Have you got
thruppence?"

I replied, humbly, that I hadn't.