Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net. [Illustration: THE AUTHOR OF _Tramping on Life_] TRAMPING ON LIFE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE HARRY KEMP GARDEN CITY NEW YORK GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc. _Copyright, 1922, by_ BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC. First Printing, September, 1922 Second Printing, November, 1922 Third Printing, January, 1923 Fourth Printing, April, 1923 Fifth Printing, July, 1923 Sixth Printing, September, 1923 Seventh Printing, November, 1923 Eighth Printing, May, 1924 Ninth Printing, November, 1924 Tenth Printing, July, 1925 Eleventh Printing, March, 1926 Twelfth Printing, February, 1927 _Printed in the United States of America_ All in this book that is good and enduring and worth while for humanity, I dedicate to the memory of my wife, MARY PYNE _Waterbury, Connecticut, May 20, 1922._ TRAMPING ON LIFE Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother. For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me. * * * * * I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three. * * * * * They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready for a flirtation.... My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store, apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him, not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald ... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military carriage. * * * * * I was four years old when my mother died. When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it. He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for farming.