As the years have gone by I have tried, whenever I have been in London, to look up the Guards that I knew during my first visit, as well as to make acquaintance with the new members. On one of my later visits a young English journalist accompanied me to the "Tavern." I told him what interesting times I had had there, and pointed out to him some of the men I knew.

"They're hacks, you know," he whispered. "Penny-a-liners. Gissing did them in 'New Grub Street.'" The young man liked neither his old companions nor the place, but he did not hesitate to borrow ten bob that he can hand back, if he wishes to, at his earliest convenience.

Call the Guards hacks, penny-a-liners or what you will; as a friend of mine once said about them, they know how to spell the word gentleman, anyhow, and that is more than many do who poke fun at them. They helped to make my first visit to London incomparably amusing at times, and for this I cannot help feeling grateful.

I have spoken of Arthur Symons' interest in my first efforts to describe tramp life. I think it was he and the magazine editors who abetted me in my scribblings, rather than the university and its doctrines of "Inquiral research," who are to blame for all tramp trips made by me in Europe. Of course, the inevitable Wanderlust was probably behind them to some extent, but all of them were undertaken with articles, and probably a book, as the ultimate object in view.

This can hardly be said of the earlier wanderings at home, and yet when eventually writing about them, they have interested me more than the tramps abroad. My vagabond days in foreign parts have received pretty much their just due in other books of mine and my wish here is more to explain what effect they had upon me as a student, and in leading on to other work here at home, than to tell what befell me on the highways. There are a few episodes and anecdotes, however, that were overlooked when making my reports from the field which may not be out of place now.

The most entertaining experience I had in Great Britain during the three weeks or so that I tramped there in 1893, concerns a well meaning professor in Edinburgh. My companion in this venture is now also a professor at one of our universities; at the time he was a fellow-student of mine in Berlin.

One of our "stops" in the itinerary planned by me was Edinburgh. We were to land at Leith from New Castle, anyhow, so why not see Edinburgh, whether we were real tramps or not?

A local professor, a friend of my family, a guest in my Berlin home at one time, was a man who believed greatly in religious things, and I guess tried to act according to his beliefs. He was noted also for his interest in the students. My friend and I thought it might be interesting to see how far the old gentleman's benevolence stretched when it came to giving charity to an American student in distress. A boyish curiosity, no doubt, but I have found in later life that such curiosity is worth while in a number of ways—when it comes to quizzing "public-spirited men," for instance, as to how far they will go into their pockets to finance investigations and prosecutions in municipal affairs.

With my friend the question was, "What story shall I tell?" I could not undertake the adventure because the professor would have recognized me. We rummaged over my basket of "ghost stories," and finally determined that the best thing was the truth with a slight change in names.

So while I waited in a coffee house near a railway station, my friend went up to the fashionable house in Queen Street with a tale of woe about being stranded in Scotland, and needing the price of a railway ticket to Glasgow that he might again get in touch with friends. Not much of a story, but quite enough for my companion—a man who had never before in his life been on tramp, and whose whole bearing was as near that of a non-sinning person as can be imagined.

He could not even use a strong expletive with a sincere ring. His face and general innocent air pieced out this linguistic purity. He was just the man I thought to test the professor's charity. I had waited in the coffee house over half an hour when my tall friend loomed up in the distance. Pretty soon he held up five fingers, and I could see that he was chuckling. "Well, fivepence, anyhow," I thought. "He might not have done any better at home—the way he's dressed." In a minute he was upon me gasping "Five bob—five bob."

I asked him for details, and he told me how he had been met at the door by a "buttons," who ushered him into the professor's study, where the "ghost story" was told and listened to. "Finally," concluded my friend, "the old gentleman reached down into his jeans and handed me the five shillings, saying, 'Well, my good man, I sincerely trust that this money will not find its way into the next public house.'"

I laughed prodigiously. "The idea," I exclaimed, "of a medical man picking you out as a person likely to go near a public house."

The next day I did not laugh so much. My people in Berlin had written the good professor that my friend and I were on a trip in Scotland and might call on him. He divined that I was getting my mail at the general post office and wrote me this note:

"Dear Friend—Your friend called here yesterday and I did not realize who he was. Had I known I would not have been so hard on him. Come and see us."

How tramps in general leave Edinburgh on a hurry-up call I cannot say, but after that note had been read two student tramps "hiked" out of that city double-quick. I took the Linlithgow road and my friend another—both, however, leading to the general post office in Glasgow, in front of which we agreed to meet thirty-six hours later. The five shillings were most punctiliously returned from this point, which also we left soon. The way that Edinburgh professor connected things was too Scotch for us.