Almost all tramps who travel alone object to women in a common lodging-house. Even the landlord of such a place soon learns from experience that women take out in accommodation the worth of their money, for they make the place too much of a home. If they are bad wives they are continually squabbling with their husbands, or scolding their children; if they are good wives they are always cooking, or covering the limited number of seats and tables with sewing material, or surrounding the fire with newly washed clothes; and the poor bachelor, who is more indifferent to cleanliness, and often prefers a slice of bacon quickly done to the labour of cooking vegetable meals--this poor bachelor complains not only that he cannot get near the fire, but that there is not enough room on the tables to lay his food, which is not often the truth. As for the landlords, they are becoming more bitter every day, and these unfortunate women now find it so difficult to get lodgings, that they dare not visit any town haphazard, but must make enquiries of their fellow travellers as to accommodation for women. Often they hear, to their disappointment, of houses that formerly lodged women being changed into houses for men only. And if these women have children, matters are still worse, for they are objected to on that account. It is therefore not the least wonder that when a man, his wife, and two or more children, succeed in being lodged, they are loth to leave that town until they have tapped it thoroughly--north, south, east, and west, house and shop; and sometimes they remain so long in that one town--perhaps three months or more--that their faces become known, and they are not supposed to belong to a tribe of wanderers. It is in the summer months, when the nights are warm, and they are independent of lodging-houses, that they prove themselves to be true travellers. Perhaps it is because women are so much better beggars than men that they are disliked both by bachelor beggars and lodging-house keepers. The former know well that if a woman once starts in a street, she will carry all before her--money, clothes, and food; and the landlords know that a woman is so successful that she is soon back again in the lodging-house; in fact she is often there twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Whereas the man, however good a beggar he may be, is absent several hours in a day, for he not only takes much longer than a woman to earn a living, but he is fond of standing at street corners, and sometimes he visits a library. The woman is instinctively inclined to make the place a home, but the man more often uses it simply as a place wherein to eat and sleep.