road itself, with its accompanying humors and adventures, forms a mutual and efficacious bond. How little we know of the "Knights of the Road," or the compelling circumstances that turned them adrift upon the world! "All sorts and conditions of men" are represented, from the college professor to the ex-pugilist. I have "hit the ties" in company with a so-called "hobo" who quoted Milton and Shakespeare by the yard, interspersed with exclamations appreciative of his enjoyment of the country through which we were passing. And once when on a tramp along the coast from San Francisco to Monterey, I fell in at Point San Pedro with a professional, who bitterly regretted the coming of the Ocean Shore Railway, then in process of construction. "For years," said he, "I have been in the habit of making this trip at regular intervals, on my way south. I had the road to myself and thoroughly enjoyed the peaceful beauty of the scene; but now this railroad has come with its mushroom towns, and all the charm has gone. Never again for me! This is my last trip!" I have not the slightest doubt that sheer love of the road - and only a tramp knows what those words mean - is the controlling influence which keeps fifty per cent of the fraternity its willing slaves. What was Senhouse - that most fascinating of Maurice Hewlett's creations - but a tramp? A gentleman tramp, if you please, but still a tramp. What is the reason that Senhouse appeals so strongly to the imagination? Simply because he loved Nature. And in this matter-of-fact period when poetry is dead and even a by-word, the man who loves Nature, if not a poet, at least has poetry in his soul. In a decadent age symbolized by the tango and the problem play, it is at least an encouraging sign for the future that such a character as Senhouse came to the jaded reader of the erotic fiction of the day, as a whiff of sea breeze on a parched plain, and was hailed with corresponding delight. Of course there are "hoboes" and "hoboes," as in any other profession, but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road has eased him of his burden and made him a philosopher. Thoreau, writing in the middle of the last century, deplores the fact that in his day, as now, but few of his countrymen took any pleasure in walking, and that very rarely one encountered a person with any real appreciation of the beauty of Nature, which if he could but see it, lay at his very door. Speaking for himself and companion in his rambles, he says: "We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts (Concord, Massachusetts) practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a Walker. Ambulator nascitur non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me,