A real honest-to-goodness professional tramp had hurriedly passed me by before the boys had caught up with me. I had a couple pork sandwiches in my pocket. My first thought was to offer them to this fellow—then thought that maybe he was not a tramp. A tractor had been running on a farm east of my place, and this fellow was just about smeary enough to have been the driver. I let him pass—and later saw him go into the depot. The wife and I were preparing to eat the sandwiches which were on the table still wrapped in oil paper. Then, this professional tramp showed up at our kitchen door, asking for a handout. Taking the two wrapped sandwiches off the table, I said, “Here you are, my man—I’ve been saving them for you.” I told him that had he not passed me by in such hurry on the railroad tracks, that I would have offered them to him then. He said he had been sick, and was hurrying to get in out of the weather. It had been “spitting” snow—which, I imagine, had caused my dinner guests at the hotel to wonder why did they leave their homes in sunny California. My home was two blocks away from the depot—and this was the tramp’s first call. Now—had this fellow “read my number” in passing on the railroad track? Or, did he read the sign at my home? It was said in the old days that tramps had a way of marking the favorable houses. My wife never let an applicant go away without something, little or much, to allay his hunger. I shall drop back a few years now and expand a bit on the trials and tribulations of my wife’s family—before she was my wife, understand. Married at the age of sixteen, and left a widow at the age of thirty-three, with little more than the home and a houseful of kids—all girls, at that — Kate Mercer found herself in a highly discouraging predicament. Deprived of the bread-winner, the almost new five-room house on an acre of ground down by the creek, on the “wrong side of the tracks,” could now hardly be called a home. It had been ideally situated for the husband and father, who had been section foreman here for eight years. There was no county welfare aid here then, as there is now. There was, however, in practice at that time the “good neighbor helping hand.” It consisted of raising a temporary fund by the circulation of a subscription paper. But when such a course was proposed by sympathetic neighbors, Mrs. Mercer, strongly backed up by her oldest daughter, declined to permit that. They would try somehow to get along without charity. They would go out and work. Thus, an up-hill drag was in store for them.