A striking example of the tramp's fondness for what he would call heavy books was a man whom I met, some years ago, at a tramp camp in central New York. We had been sitting around the camp-fire for some time, discussing matters of the road, when the man called my attention to his weak eyes. I had noticed that the lids of his eyes were very red, and he told me that it was only with difficulty that he could read even large print. "Used them up in the stir" (penitentiary), he explained. "We had no work to do, and were shut up in our cells practically all of the time, and I simply read myself blind." I asked him what kind of reading he had enjoyed most, and he gave me a string of authors' names, whose books he had drawn from the library, which but few college graduates could beat. I have forgotten many of the books he mentioned, but Kant's "Pure Reason" and Burton's "Melancholy" were among the number. We talked together for over three hours about writers and writing, and I have seldom enjoyed a conversation more. The man was still a tramp in essential matters, and had no intention of becoming anything better, but his reading had widened the boundaries of his world to such an extent that in other clothes and with a few changes in his diction he might have passed muster in very respectable companionship. If he is alive, he is probably still looking for "set-downs" and "hand-outs," and discussing between meals with the hoboes the wonderful things that were revealed to him during the ten years he spent in his prison university. Endowed with this interest in books of a serious nature, it would seem that the tramp ought eventually to take to heart some of the wisdom such books contain, and try to live up to it in his every-day life, but I am compelled to say that, in the majority of cases, he considers himself a being apart from the rest of the world, so far as moral responsibility is concerned. He likes to ponder over the moral obligations of others, and to suggest schemes for a general social regeneration, but he finds it irksome and unpleasant to apply his advice and recommendations to his own existence. Theoretically, he has what he would call a religion, but he no more expects to live up to his religion than he intends to work when he can get out of it. He has two worlds in which he lives,--one consisting of theories and fanciful conceits which he has got from books and his own imagination, and the other of hard facts, prejudices, and habits. He is most natural in the latter environment, but moods come over him when he feels impelled to project himself into the world of theories, and then nothing pleases him more than imaginatively to reconstruct the world in general as he believes it ought to be.