THE GENUS TRAMP.
“One half the world knows not how the other half lives,” and for the
matter of that doesn’t care. The “one half,” by which in all probability
is meant the well-to-do portion of the community, neither know nor
care how their impoverished “brothers and sisters” (dearly beloved of
course) live, nor for the matter of that how they die. Reader, gentle,
fair or otherwise, were you ever the unhappy possessor of that rather
unnecessary article known as the “key of the street?” Have you been out
visiting until the “wee sma’ hours,” and on returning to your lodgings
found that you had left your latch-key at home, also your cash, and
the dread of your irate landlady, to whom you probably are in arrears,
prevents you from rousing the house up? You have no intimate friend to
quarter yourself on, not sufficient money to pay for bed and breakfast
at a first-class hotel (the only ones accessible at that hour)? If so,
then you must per force make use of your key of the street, or, in other
words, tramp the city the remainder of the night, or rather morning,
until long after “Faint Aurora dawns.”
If, gentle reader, you have gone through this, to you, trying ordeal,
you will readily comprehend some of the situations that I will try to
describe in this paper. If not, I will endeavor to enlighten you as to
the ways and means used in struggling or rather shambling through the
world by those enfants trouves, known to the benevolent as, “homeless
poor.”
I speak of their ways and means rather than manners and customs,
which may be described as the midshipman wrote down in his journal,
the “Manners and customs” of the Fiji Islanders: “Manners—None.
Customs—Nasty.”
How many of the 100,000 and odd (and some of them are very odd) people
of Toronto, who in their daily walks abroad, come across at intervals
numbers of squalid, unkempt, ragged, and
RUM-BLOSSOMED BEINGS,
ever give a thought as to how these miserables live. Where did they come
from? Where are they going to? How do they get their food, and above
all, where do they rest at night? Such questions as these never bother
the brains of the gay gentlemen and ladies fair who when out for a walk
meet these bedraggled wights. They see them and turn away in disgust.
Even the ladies bountiful who (to their honor be it said) have their own
pet charitable institutions, know them not; they also, like the priest
and the Levite, pass them by. These objects that you meet, ladies and
gentlemen, are mostly professional tramps, and a most uncanny tribe
they are. A great many of them have seen better days, but misfortune,
disappointments, blighted hopes, and above all an overwhelming craving
for alcoholic stimulants, fostered in their palmy days, perhaps by
champagne, Hockhiemer, and Moselle, but now only satisfied by the
soul-corroding whiskey which they love, has brought them down to
their present condition. Many of them, however, are born vagabonds,
who have been “constitutionally tired” since their infancy. Some of
them have trades, which they are too lazy to work at, even if their
whisky-shattered nerves would allow them; but they are too far gone now
to attempt anything in the shape of industry. Besides, what mechanic or
tradesman would hire them? They are in rags and filthy, and an unholy and
pungent atmosphere, suggestive of an ancient distillery, pervades their
surroundings. These aromatic gentry, as I before stated, are tramps,
proper, pure, and simple. The nomadic harbingers and epitomes of all that
is squalid, wretched, and poverty-stricken in the land. Hopeless, hungry,
and miserable, they tramp on their weary way, friendless, forgotten, and
unknown until, upon the mattrass of some jail hospital, or out in the
fields beneath the stars, they breathe their last and take their final
tramp.
I have given you a picture of the ordinary tramp, who overruns the
continent from Collingwood to Galveston, from Portland to San Francisco,
and is merely an ill-omened bird of passage, as in contradistinction to
our
LOCAL VAGABONDISTI,
who remain year in and year out in our midst; and it is of these
miserables who have made Toronto their field of action, or rather
inaction, that I wish particularly to speak. Go down, let us say, to the
Market square, any day during the winter, or in the months of navigation
to the Esplanade. Hovering around the doors of the omnipresent “saloon”
they lounge, a motley crowd. Occasionally, if the weather is not too
rainy or cold, they may be seen posing on the lee side of a corner house,
smoking clay pipes of unknown age, or chewing black strap in meditative
mood. But the grog shop is always their objective point, and they seldom
go far from its beery borders. Occasionally they invest the barroom to
thaw themselves out in cold weather, and with a faint hope that someone
will “set ’em up,” but they seldom stay long, for they know they are not
wanted by the proprietor, who hesitates not to make them aware of the
fact, and the seeker after spiritual comfort, after taking a long last,
lingering look at the array of bottles, secures his overcoat upon him
with its solitary button, and goes forth again into the cheerless streets.
These unfortunates eke out a miserable existence in the winter time by
transferring dark diamonds from the carts to the household coal bins,
shoveling snow and doing odd jobs of all sorts, by which they manage to
get hold of a quarter or so, and on receipt of the same betake themselves
to a grog shop, taking care to choose one where a layout of pulpy and
scoriac liver, yellow ochre-like mustard, and stale bread form the menu
of the free lunch. How on earth they manage to exist at all during the
long winter would be a deep and perplexing mystery, were it not from the
knowledge of the fact that there is such a place as “Castle Green” on
the banks of the Don, where a great many of them pass the happy hours
away under sentences from “the colonel.” In fact, too many of them. The
jail is simply a harbor of refuge, to which they, by getting drunk or
disorderly, can easily find their way, for notwithstanding the fact that
these poor wretches have little comfort or enjoyment to look forward to
in their hard journey of life, they prefer the cell and jail corridor,
“skilly” and bread and water, and loss of liberty as well, to being
half starved and in danger of freezing to death to the dignity of a few
citizen.
Summer is the most propitious season for the bummer. When spring comes in
earnest and navigation commences he changes venue from the inhospitable
market square and its surroundings, and seeks the busy Esplanade with
its outlying wharves where he, although not belonging to any organized
stevedores gang, picks up a good many jobs in helping to load and unload
vessels of all kinds, when he may be said to revel in comparative
wealth, though his outward man is, as to dress, unchanged, for he, like
many other philosophers, treats with scorn the vanity of dress.