So while I waited in a coffee house near a railway station, my friend went up to the fashionable house in Queen Street with a tale of woe about being stranded in Scotland, and needing the price of a railway ticket to Glasgow that he might again get in touch with friends. Not much of a story, but quite enough for my companion--a man who had never before in his life been on tramp, and whose whole bearing was as near that of a non-sinning person as can be imagined. He could not even use a strong expletive with a sincere ring. His face and general innocent air pieced out this linguistic purity. He was just the man I thought to test the professor's charity. I had waited in the coffee house over half an hour when my tall friend loomed up in the distance. Pretty soon he held up five fingers, and I could see that he was chuckling. "Well, fivepence, anyhow," I thought. "He might not have done any better at home--the way he's dressed." In a minute he was upon me gasping "Five bob--five bob." I asked him for details, and he told me how he had been met at the door by a "buttons," who ushered him into the professor's study, where the "ghost story" was told and listened to. "Finally," concluded my friend, "the old gentleman reached down into his jeans and handed me the five shillings, saying, 'Well, my good man, I sincerely trust that this money will not find its way into the next public house.'" I laughed prodigiously. "The idea," I exclaimed, "of a medical man picking you out as a person likely to go near a public house." The next day I did not laugh so much. My people in Berlin had written the good professor that my friend and I were on a trip in Scotland and might call on him. He divined that I was getting my mail at the general post office and wrote me this note: "Dear Friend--Your friend called here yesterday and I did not realize who he was. Had I known I would not have been so hard on him. Come and see us." How tramps in general leave Edinburgh on a hurry-up call I cannot say, but after that note had been read two student tramps "hiked" out of that city double-quick. I took the Linlithgow road and my friend another--both, however, leading to the general post office in Glasgow, in front of which we agreed to meet thirty-six hours later. The five shillings were most punctiliously returned from this point, which also we left soon. The way that Edinburgh professor connected things was too Scotch for us. CHAPTER XV TWO TRAMPING EXPERIENCES