happily rare, and tend to become rarer, petty violence is far from uncommon. Many ladies resident in the country can tell how they have been beset upon the highway by sturdy tramps of forbidding aspect, to whom, in despair, they have given alms to an amount which practically made the solicitation an act of brigandage. The farmer’s wife and the bailiff tell us how haystacks are converted into temporary lodging-houses, chickens stolen, and outbuildings plundered. Only too often the rogues are in direct league with the worst offenders in London. Whitechapel supplies a large contingent of the Kentish hop-pickers, and the ‘traveller’ who is ostensibly in search of a haymaking or hopping job is, as often as not, spying out the land, and planning profitable burglaries to be carried out in winter with the aid of his colleagues. “There is, no doubt, much about the tramp that is picturesque. A romantic imagination pictures him as a sort of peripatetic philosopher, with more of Jacques in him than of Autolycus; living in constant communion with Nature; sleeping in the open air; subsisting on the scantiest fare; slaking his thirst at the running brook; and only begging to be allowed to live his own childlike and innocent life, as purposeless as the butterflies, as happy as the swallows, as destitute of all worldly ends and aims as are the very violets of the hedge-row. Æsthetic enthusiasm of this kind is apt to be severely checked by the prosaic realities of actual existence. The tramp, like the noble savage, is a relic of uncivilised life with which we can very well afford to dispense. There is no appreciation of the country about him; no love of Nature for its own sake. In winter he becomes an inmate of the workhouse, where he almost always proves himself turbulent and disorderly. As soon as it becomes warm enough to sleep in a haystack, or under a hedge, or in a thick clump of furze and bracken, he discharges himself from ‘the Union’ and takes to ‘the roads.’ From town to town he begs or steals his way, safe in the assurance that should things go amiss the nearest workhouse must always provide him with gratuitous board and lodging. Work of any kind, although he vigorously pretends to be in ‘want of a job,’ is utterly abhorrent to him. Home county farmers, led by that unerring instinct which is the unconscious result of long experience, know the tramp at once, and can immediately distinguish him from the _bonâ-fide_ ‘harvester,’ in quest of honest employment. The tramp, indeed, is the sturdy idler of the roads—a cousin-german of the ‘beach-comber,’ who is the plague of consuls and aversion of merchant skippers. In almost every port of any size the harbour is beset by a gang of idle fellows, whose pretence is that they are anxious to sign articles for a voyage, but who are, in reality, living from hand to mouth. Captains know only too well that the true ‘beach-comber’ is always incompetent, often physically