The obesity was purely artificial. The tramp had on three flannel shirts, at least, besides several heavy waistcoats and two pairs of trousers and as many coats, with a possibility of there being three. The outer garments were quaint mosaics of patches, positively ingenious in their interlacing adherence to one another and in their rude preservation of original outlines of dress. From him came the pungent reek of bad whiskey and stale tobacco. It was as though the man stood clothed in outward and visible signs of unseen realities, enveloped in the rigid habit of his own wrong-doing, draped in the mystery of inherited tendencies, and cloaked in the stern facts of a hard environment. And yet, as beneath the filthy outer covering there was a human being, so under these veiling, unseen vestures was a man, a living soul created by the Almighty. I could hear him muttering gruffly to himself as he slowly descended to his turn at the foot of the steps. “Well, Weary, where are you from? A hobo from Hoboville, I guess,” and the officer’s voice rang strong and clear up the staircase to the dim landing, where stood the waiting line of men. The two slummers laughed aloud. “From Maine,” said the tramp. The voice came hoarse and thin and broken-winded from a throat eaten out by disease. “Well, you’re a rare one, if you’re a Yankee. But what brought you to Chicago?” “Lookin’ for work at the World’s Fair.” “You lie, you lazy loafer. The last thing you’re looking for is work. You all tell that World’s Fair lie. There’s been as many of you in Chicago every winter for the last ten years as there is this winter.” The man was stung. “I’ve as good a right here as you,” he said. “You have, have you!” cried the officer in quick rejoinder, but with no loss of temper. “Look at me, you filthy hobo,” he added, drawing himself to his full, imposing height. “I’m a police officer. I’ve held my job for eleven years, and got my promotions. I’m earning eighty dollars a month, do you see? Now go down there where you belong,” and he pointed imperiously to the far end of the corridor. My turn came next. “Here’s another whiskers,” announced the officer in explanation to his charges; “same kind, only younger and newer to the business.” And then to me, “Where are you from?” he said. I replied with some inanity in mock German. “Oh, he’s a Dutchman. We get a few of them. But they’re mostly older men, and kind of moody, and they tramp alone a good bit. Can’t you talk English?” I said something in very bad French. “Oh, I guess he’s a Frenchy. That’s very uncommon----” I interrupted his information with a line from Virgil, spoken with an inflection of inquiry. “He may be a Dago, or a--ah----” he hesitated. I broke in with a sentence in Greek. “Or a Russian,” concluded the officer. I thought that I could mystify him finally, and so I pronounced a verse from Genesis in Hebrew. But he was equal to the emergence.