Popular books, such as "Trilby," "David Harum," and "Mr. Dooley," almost never reach the tramps until long after their immediate success is over. The tramps have no money to invest in books of the hour, and the consequence is that while the public is reading the book of some new favourite author, they are poring over books that were popular several years back. There are roadsters who are to-day reading for the first time the earliest books of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and other well-known authors, and the next crop of vagabonds will probably read the works of writers who are now in the foreground. In Chicago I met, one day, a tramp who had just discovered Bret Harte, and he thought that "Tennessee's Partner" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" were recent stories. "I tell ye, Cigarette," he declared, enthusiastically, "those stories'll make that fella's fortune. Jus' wait till people get to talkin' about 'em, an' you'll see how they'll sell." He had read the tales in a sailor's mission to which somebody had donated a mutilated Tauchnitz edition of Bret Harte's writings. In a county jail in Ohio I also once heard two tramps discuss for nearly two hours the question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays when he did or about two hundred years later. The tramp who favoured the latter theory based it on the supposition that the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet" could not have been possible so far back as "in Shakespeare's time." "Why, gol darn it," he exclaimed, "they didn't have no such porches in them days. A porch, I tell ye, is a modern invention, just like dynamite is."