"Mr. Brown I read a artical of yours in the Sunday Oregonian on the Down and outs, belonging to that club I thought it might interest you to read this and therein you might solve the question, (what makes a tramp). I was born in Creston, Lancashire, Eng on the 27 of Nov 1876 my mother & father both died before I was four years old, and I was brought up with a family who we boarded with, my new mother was an angel, but her husband was a brute to me, but he was all right to his own children, but anytime I done wrong there was always that old song we ought to have sent you to the workhouse instead of trying to raise you to be a man. Notice what chance I had. At 10 years old I was put to work in one of those dreaded cotton mills, a half a day to school and a half a day in hell to work till I was 13 years old and then I went in on full time. 3 more years of this slaving and I got a chance to come too U. S. and I jumped at the chance, a cousin of mine paying my fare too Woonsocket where some more of those hell holes of cotton mills are, and so again in too the cotton mills I went, but a little over a year of such wrongs, I seeked new fields. I run away and went to boston, mass, where one night finding myself stranded I went to the Municipal lodgins, and get a poor bed and some soup. God only knows what it was made of and the next morning I was out and hustling and having a natural love for a horse, around the sales stables I went and I found out a man could always pick up a piece of change runing horses up and down the streets and taking them down to depot, and geting warmed up one day and having no other clothes I caught cold which turned into pneumonia and I went to the city hospital. the treatment there was fine and I never will forget the face of my nurse. when I came out I was weak and scaled about 90. having no money that night I had to go to the Municipal loding, and I told the officer in charge about coming out of the hospital that morning and he asked me to show him my discharge papers and I handed them out to him and he looked at them and tore them up right in front of my face, and said you -- -- -- -- your working the hospitals are you, and then he kicked me all the way down to the bath room and said he see that I sawed enough of wood in the morning, and he was there and after working a while I fell from weakness and the brute kicked me while I lay helpless and one lodger said something to him and he was promptly hustled inside and the patrol came down and took him away but I noticed he did not send me to see the judge. No, instead he told me to get out and never show my face again, which I never have. A few days after I got picked up on the street one night kind of late and took a front of the judge the next morning, the first time I was ever in a court room and charged with being Idle and Disorderly and was sent to the Reformatory at Concord and was for the next 13 months known as 9510. having no friends on the outside and