During the first month of my wanderings I was bedless, and frequently roofless. Indeed, when I finally did rest or try to, in a bed, the experience was so strange that I slept very little. A box-car, a hay-stack, a railway tie drawn close to a fire--these were my principal lodging places during the entire eight months. It may have been a hard outing, but it toughened and inured me to unpleasantness which would certainly seem very undesirable now. In a way, they were undesirable then. I always laugh when a tramp tells me that he is happier in a box-car than in a bed. He merely fancies that he is, and I certainly should not like to risk offering him my bed in exchange for his box-car. Yet at the time in question I was able to sleep uncommonly well in box-car or hay-stack, and except when traveling at night, eight hours' good rest constituted my regular portion. In general, I kept track of the names of the different States and large cities I visited, but, when asked to-day whether I have been in a certain town, I am often at a loss for an answer; I simply do not know whether I have been there or not. On the other hand, certain "stops" at comparatively insignificant places have clung in my memory when much larger places that I must have seen are dim and hazy. All told, I traveled in the great majority of the full-fledged States of that period, and visited many of the large cities. At one of these minor "stops" in Michigan, I probably had a chance to experiment with that tantalizing dream of earlier years--the notion that to amount to anything I must go secretly to some place, work my way into a profession, and then on up the ladder until I should be able to return to my people, and say: "Well, with all my cussedness, I managed to get on." The town had the conventional academy and other educational institutions which my dream had always included in the career I had in mind, and there was a hospitality about the people which promised all kinds of things. I got my dinner at the home of a well-to-do widow who very sensibly made me work for it, chopping wood, a task that I was careful to perform behind the house so that my companions, real hoboes, every one of them, should not see me breaking one of their cardinal rules. The work over, I was invited into the dining room for my meal, during which the good hostess asked me rather minutely about my life. For some reason, I was in the "self-made man" mood at the time, and told the woman about my desire for an education, and later, a professional career. She came over to my seat, examined my cranium, and then, turning to her daughter--a sightly miss--said: "The head is not at all badly shaped. He _may_ be bright."