[4] A peddler of bogus jewelry. V THE CITY TRAMP Vagabonds specialize nowadays quite as much as other people. The fight for existence makes them do it. Although a few tramps are such all-round men that they can succeed almost anywhere, there are a great many others who find that they must devote their time to one distinct line of begging in order to succeed. So to-day we have all sorts of hoboes. There are house-beggars, office-beggars, street-beggars, old-clothes beggars, and of late years still another specialization has become popular in vagabondage. It is called "land-squatting," which means that the beggar in question has chosen a particular district for his operations. Of course, a large number of tramps still go over all the country, but it is becoming quite customary for vagabonds to pick out certain States and counties for their homes. The country, as a whole, is so large that no beggar can ever really know it on business principles, and some clever beggars not long ago decided that it is better to know thoroughly a small district than to have only a general knowledge of the entire continent. Consequently our large cities have become overrun with tramps who make them their homes the year round, till America can almost compete with England in the number of her "city vags." There is no large town in the United States that does not support its share, and it is seldom that these tramps are natives of the towns in which they beg. In New York, for example, there are scores of beggars who were born in Chicago, and vice versa. They have simply picked out the city which pleases them most and gone there. In time they become so numerous that it is found necessary to specialize still further, and even to divide the town itself into districts, and to assign them to distinct kinds of begging. It is of these specialists in vagrancy that I intend to write in this chapter. [Illustration: TOMATO-CAN TRAMPS.] The lowest type is what is called in tramp parlance the "tomato-can vag." In New York city, which has its full quota of these miserable creatures, they live in boxes, barrels, cellars, and nooks and corners of all sorts, where they can curl up and have a "doss" (sleep). They get their food, if it can be called that, by picking over the refuse in the slop-barrels and tomato-cans of dirty alleys. They beg very little, asking usually for the stale beer they find now and then in the kegs near saloons. Money is something that they seldom touch, and yet a good many of them have been first-class criminals and hoboes in their day. I used to know a tomato-can tramp who lived for several months in a hogshead near the East-Side docks of New York. I visited him one night when on a stroll in that part of the city, and had a talk with him about his life. After he had reeled off a fine lot of yarns, he said: