Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 July 1890 — TRAMPS AND THEIR WAYS. [ARTICLE]

TRAMPS AND THEIR WAYS.

A Careful and Practical Study of the Knights of the Road. The rector of Rettendon has been discoursing for the entertainment of audiences at the Chelmford museum on the‘subject of ‘ Tramps,” to which he has devoted a careful study, not in books, but in the highways and byways of his neighborhood. Fssex is not quite so fruitful in samples of the genus as Kent, where Cbas. Dickens once met that immortal tramp who could tell you the wtorkhouse where on Christmas day you might count on ‘ ‘as jolly a blow-out of beef and Haters as ever passed your breast bone.” There are seasons when the pedestrian tourist bn the Kentish highways may expecL ta, be asked for alms by nearly every other passenger he meets, says the London Daily News, but at most times of the year you may wander far between the soft, undulating country about Saffron, Walden and the commanding hills of Laindon and Danbury —for with such landscape beauty is Essex, in spite of ignorant detractors, richly endowed—without suffering and very serious annoyance from the too familiar plaintive appeal of the professional beggar.Jwho is always making for somewhere in quest of the job that he never finds. Nevertheless, Mr. Webster has found opportunities even in this favored corner of our island of observing closely the habits and customs of those whom he calls ‘•the knight and ladies of the honorable order of cadgers.” A slight incident drew his attention to this subject. Coming to cross-roads on a long trip one day, he was undecided which turn to take, until a tramp came along and was observed carefully to study a moss-grown post and choose his road. A subsequent examination of the post revealed certain marks, which were rude resemblances of a Greek letter, marked on posts and gates by tramps for the guidance of their fellows. These signs are made it seems, with a sharpened nail, specimens of which the lecturer was able to produce. They serve as a chisel, a tobacco-stop-per, a latch-lifter, and so on. The largest class of those knights ,of_the. road who affect the Essex lanes and highways is, we are assured, recruited from the ranks of broken-down clergymen and schoolmasters. You can always tell them. A rusty alpaca coat, cuffs very frayed, odd gloves-,-one kid, onh cotton -form the attire of the clergyman tramp, who pulls off his hat in an obsequious manner, and always has a very large family. The equipment for a life on the road is generally an old tin cocoa box. lined with pink paper, with a small piece of lookingglass in the lid, and filled with needles “that won’t prick.” pencils and ink “that won’t mark,” and other commodities of the shrt wherewith Autolycus was wont to fill his pack, and the whole “rig-out” costing about half a crown.

Various races have curious modes of greeting, Englishmen shake hands, Indians rub noses, but when tramps meet they always sit down and take off their boots. If two knights “pal-up,” one takes the * ‘patter” and the other the “line,” or “link.” On the way from place to place the various signs good or bad, on posts and gates—are examined and the two know exactly how to conductdhemselves— what they will get-here and what they will not get there. A carefully arranged and expressive “snivel” is regarded as their most valuable acquirement. The “religious snivel” and nthe “lost-a-“relative snivel” are also good. It is a curious fact that the eight best-known signs used by tramps are nearly all Greek and mathematical symbols, one being especially remarkable-the Greek “Iheta,” which being the first letter of “thees.” is put on the gates of religious people’s houses • Other signs mean: ; Will buy if you have got what they want,” “A good feed,” “No good,” “A certainty,” “Spoilt,” “Prison,” “Very dangerous,” etc. The slight acquaintance displayed with mathematics and the Greek alphabet confirms Mr. Webster’s belief that broken-down clergymen and schoolmasters, helpless victims probably of the terrible drink craze, form a considerable item in the ranks of the Essex “knights of the road.” but the ways and devices of the Essex cadgers and “Crusitors” still retain the common features of English roguery and mendicancy as depicted in old Harman’s “Caveat” and “Fraternity of Vagabonds,” which saw the light in the days when Shakspeare was a school-boy, and the Bohemian “snapper up of unconsidered trifles” has not yet made complaint that “gallows and knockare 100 powerful on our highways.