From St. Joseph, Mich., to Washington, D. C. New York, Boston, Canada,
and Home—1894

ANY day of all the days is a day apart, with a record of swift-moving pictures all its own," Jack has said. Still charmed with the absence of monotony in a peripatetic existence "for such as cannot use one bed too long," he, being one of these, pulled out upon the brake-beams again some time in July. He was now wearer of the proud nom-de-rail of "Frisco Kid," and would "go observin' matters" first in Washington, D. C., thence up the Atlantic railroad lines to other cities.

I have before me an eloquently battered note-book of cheapest imitation red leather. It contains names and addresses of friends at home, including Louis Shattuck and a Mr. Darnell; and there is a string of girls—Lizzie Connolly, who figures as a character in "Martin Eden"; Katie, Nellie, Dollie, and Bernice; and a few eastern names, among them Eugene J. McCarthy, 69 Barton Street, Boston. One item reads: "Mrs. Logan's house—her house used to be the old stone hospital during the war." Captain Shepard and Eliza, both for some time past engaged in the business of prosecuting pension claims, had been guests of General Logan's widow during the Grand Encampment of the G. A. E. in Washington two years before Jack blew into the city, and Eliza wished Jack to meet her friends. Her brother's annotations reveal the intention of seeing every thing possible relating to the war in which John London had fought Abraham Lincoln's fight to preserve the Union.

Follows an itinerary of sight-seeing, such as "Alexander, Va., by steamer, fare 15c," and short historical references to Arlington, Mount Vernon, and other suburbs. And of course this was his first chance to see the Atlantic ocean and dream of further travel. The first deciperable data in the scrappy little journal is Thursday, August 9, 1894, on which he made a tour of the United States government buildings, the name of each crossed off as done with.

A couple of tiny pages are devoted to prose on the subject of "Beauty," which, though without grace of quotation marks, he credits to Frank D. Sherman. Evidently Jack had been dipping into wells of theological speculation, for several sheets are covered by a dissertation on Deism and Theism based on the query: "Which came into the world first, the chicken or the egg?" One may judge from his remarks that biologically he was far from satisfied with the Bible story of Adam and Eve and the succeeding generation or two.

There are copies of quite commonplace sentimental songs of the day, with their refrains; and his current notion of humor may be guessed from this:

Fragments of dialogue that struck him as worth preserving, perhaps for use in the yarns submitted to Aunt Mary, are interspersed with copies of poems, good and bad, conundrums lacking answers, and streaks of tramp vernacular. And midmost of this living stuff one meets a quoted verse that speak's the boy's awareness of life's unrest:

"Twere best at once to sink to peace
Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness, and to cease."

Some years ago, sorting over keepsakes he had stored in the Oakland residence where Jack London housed his mother and his Mammy Jennie, he came across that little worn memorandum-book. "Look, Mate—here's one of the diaries I kept in my tramp days," he cried, and fell to running over the penciled notations. Presently he looked up with a moist luster over the profound gray of those deep-fringed eyes, and the expression of untried chastity upon his mouth which made him into a beautiful boy-child hesitant to divulge his deeper emotions. "It brings up my groping ideals of that time," very softly he went on, "and I want you to mark especially how I recurred to my old ambition for fatherhood and stability in life, in spite of my vagabonding tastes. Listen to this." And what he read quite solemnly to me, I now give from the same source, reverently word for word:

"In Washington, D. C., Thursday, August 9, 1894, in the afternoon, suddenly there came over me a great longing for paternity. A longing for children; not a sensuous longing for the accompanying pleasure of begetting them, but a pure spiritual longing for something in this world to look up to me; to depend on me; trust me, and be akin to me, as I must have been to my father and mother. Now I must confess that this is rather foolish of me, a lad of eighteen, to think of. It was brought on by contemplating the hopeless, friendless condition of a tramp I had been talking with in particular, and of the whole of mankind in general. I always said that I would not marry till 26 or 27, and I still think that holds good. But I will look around me in the meantime and try and profit by the experience, obtained by others through the lottery of marriage."

Evidences of his awakening interest in economics are to be found in scattered quotations, as well as through

observations of his own. Having attached himself to a job that he might make a better appearance whilst seeing the metropolis and his sister's friends, it is inconceivable that he did not spend some of his spare hours at the libraries. He was plainly studying for a vocabulary, as well as facile punctuation, attested, as one reads on, by a strict following of the latter in quoting authors.

At some period of his stay in Washington he seems to have put up at the "Hillman House, at 226 North Capitol St." Hard upon some comments on immortality and the merits and demerits of a man's taking his own life, by Jas. E. Barker, a number of narrow pages are filled by Hamlet's Soliloquy, followed by a couplet from Longfellow's "Golden Legend" that might have been the suggestion for Jack London's disposal of the hero in "Martin Eden":

"A single step and all is o er.
A plunge, a bubble, and no more."

The job above referred to might be classified as janitorship in a livery-stable, where he also made his sleeping quarters. In line of relaxation and easement of his gambling proclivities, he was not averse to sit in at various highly exciting and illicit crap-games by gas-light with negro horse-boys and their friends. A concerted police raid upon a session one evening, when as luck would have it, he was only a "broke" onlooker, was the cause of Jack's resigning his position. This he did by way of a window, first dodging on all fours between the irate legs of an officer with that catlike quickness of his. That he could put up a better sprint than the star-breasted "bull" who decorated with the window-sash, lit out upon his heels, was the reason Jack did not sleep behind bars.

Indeed, he did not rest at all that night. Added to the fact that the "cops" were on his track, he had seen and done all the things for which he had come to Washington, and now seemed the fateful moment for him to quit the

beautiful city. So he worked his discreet flight around toward the railroad yards, where he caught the first "blind" out on the Pennsylvania Express. At Baltimore a railroad bull reached for him before he had swung off the platform, and the night s second Marathon was on for many confusing blocks in a strange "burg." His prided sense of direction helped him back to the tracks, where successfully eluding "bull" and "shack" he ensconsed himself damp and winded on a baggage platform. But that sense of direction suffered a grievous set-back when, after forty shivering miles, he discovered himself again in the bright station at Washington. He had squandered the whole night in a fatuous round-trip to Baltimore. Mad as a wet hen, spraining even his robust Western vocabulary, he rested not or breakfasted until, late in the morning, again in Baltimore, he "threw his feet for grub."

Thence up through Pennsylvania he adventured, always overtaking the variety upon which his nature feasted. Little he asked of the world, it seemed to him just the privilege of going and coming quite harmlessly at his own sweet will, with gift of an occasional meal, infrequent loan of cigarette "makin's," and a place under roof or stars to "pound his ear," meaning to slumber.

One day when he was swimming alone in the Susquehanna, some one went through his clothing. He bewailed the loss of his tobacco more than the small change. But "I leave it to you," he laughed it off, "if being robbed isn't adventure enough for one day. Glad that the thieves had spared his clothes, shortly he had the pleasure of borrowing what he could have sworn were his own "makin's" from a bunch of waifs who were not wide awake enough to perceive that he was "on."

There was that fearful afternoon, he, a hobo, suffered mental and emotional torture in a camp of American gipsies, when one of the men dispassionately flogged his children and their protesting mother. Here Jack, most

passionate of champions of the weak of either sex, had to call upon a philosophy out of keeping with his age to control all knightly inheritance of his long line of fighting forefathers, that he might refrain from interference. It would have made the woman s plight more desperate, and undoubtedly brought about his annihilation. Eight or wrong in the abstract struggled in his brain with man's civil-and uncivil-practices. But in his own anguish in the woman's anguish, which made him clench longing fists till a gipsy man, noting, for Jack's own safety warned "Easy, pardner, easy," there came to his succor one face of the uncommon common-sense that reinforced sensitiveness all his difficult life. In her ethic, this woman gipsy among gipsies would not thank a rank outsider for "butting in." Jack had marveled before this upon the notorious ingratitude of certain females, oftenest of foreign blood, when their husbands were deterred, by outsiders, from fistic manifestation of possessiveness. As well might Jack's deep-burnt emotion have justified him in trying to halt with his hands an execution by hanging which later in youth he witnessed at San Quentin. These were not hazards in the open, where the best man or beast wins. Outrageous, hurtful, abysmal wrongs, in his profoundest deeps he felt them to be. But they were the law: one, the law of the outlaw, if you please; the other, alas, the strange law of that most free of all civilized nations, for which his father and his father's father and grandfathers had bled.

So he drew himself together with a mighty effort and met, cool steel for steel, the glitter of the gipsyman's narrowed black eye. He could fake an indifferent aspect; but his flesh was clammy and he was sick to his marrow every crack of the wicked thong laid on the cowering woman's frame striped his soul with red as few experiences ever marked it. It did more; it lashed him to swifter sifting of the tares from the wheat in his abundant thought-harvest.

But Jack was healthy-minded and -bodied, and it would

have been a morbidity not to dismiss the occurrence as best he could. The development of that mind had not reached a point where he could even think he knew the remedy for such demonstration as he had witnessed. The searing day was done—". . . one day of all my days. To-morrow would be another day, and I was young," he said.

As he "pointed his toes" northward, unknown to him self adventure was undergoing a transmutation into something potentially different from the ideal which had quickened imagination and footstep to the varied gifts of earth. His unquieting perceptiveness was getting in under the skin of things the while he paid a lessening if still bright and discerning attention to the world of landscape and architecture and industry. From these, indeed, he wrested progression and sustenance, alone or in company with specimens of the floating population of incompetents that coasted this same smiling prospect.

Men were so wonderful, he could not fail to be impressed, when he looked about his father's great state and the Quaker City, in a similar way that he had been impressed by any large town since his careless days in Yokohama. When men could be so wonderful, why were many of them such hopeless derelicts? This early he was exhibiting a penchant for inviting secrets from the most furtive and cryptic human sources. In his life's periodical " prowlings," done out of driven curiosity to see how society was managed or mismanaged, many a woman of the street or brothel who earned her price with a surprised willingness, by merely treating the friendly searcher to a correct study of causes she had hidden with a reticence that had been her one pride.

As he held up and turned inside-out before his mind the unlovely confidences to which this sympathetic faculty made him. confessor, Jack was blest if he could see where he himself had anything on most men in the matter of opportunity. Some, indeed, had been maimed—they did not

count in this strain of reasoning. And yet, and yet, come to think of it, they did count, at least a large per cent. From that night in Sacramento when he, the novice, had left behind him some two-score professional hoboes, one of whom had been cut in two, he had noticed how man after man was beaten by inefficiency at his business of run ning away from useful efficiency. Jack's own survival could not be all blind luck, he thought. The others must be failures from aforetime, hereditary inefficients. He got the phrase reading of afternoons in free grassy parks, where he loafed and warmed up after a chilly or wakeful night, and invited knowledge from book, or newspaper he had "frisked" by dawnlight off some doorstep. Book or folded paper formed his sleeping pillow. And of course—always of course, it seemed—there was the toll of alcohol's vanquished. His own luck apparently resided in the inheritance of a good body that was informed by a good brain—a brain at least of ability to withhold him from becoming permanently a piece of the floatsam of mankind with whom he now drifted.

Moreover, time and again he met hoboes who were from the first ranks of a culture he had only glimpsed, as when with the poetess-librarian friend of his childhood, Ina Coolbrith. From these abodeless ones, who had lapsed to a plane that seemed scarcely related to the every-day world of men, he learned of the arts or professions that had been their callings, and was stirred afresh to his own ambitions. The majority of the decayed gentlemen who slouched within his radius, he could not reason clearly otherwise, were foreordained wrecks. One had been a Philadelphia attorney, university graduate and the rest, and upon his intellect of many facets Jack sharpened his own while they traveled together. Oddly enough, it was in this companion ship that he fell into the only serious difficulty he encountered in trampdom.

Something that had disturbed him for long; something

definite, hard and fine, yet palpitating warm and tender, was coming into being in his heart. And though he knew it not, it was Love, the most selfless of all loves—nor love of blood, nor for woman, but the brother-love for the unlovely and unloved forsaken of men, which was destined to break that heart of his in the end.

But not yet was he possessed. It was a hell of a note, to be sure; but what could a fellow do? So he went on his way, "a beggar gay," rejoicing in glorious well-being and freedom, in his stomach "that could digest scrap-iron," and in his own fortune generally. He took chances with that luck, in a manner that challenged weary outwitted brakemen and even policemen who had not forgotten their youth or else remembered their sons who were chips off the old block, challenged them to implore him not to commit suicide. This they argued he was bound to do if he persisted in riding two fast-freight cars at once, as a circus rider divides himself between two or more horses in the sawdust ring. Many the officer he drove to incoherent very despair of wrath, until he would give up to Jack's uncapturable agility or the eloquence or humor of his ready slanging. But his supreme wide-awakeness guarded the young wilful from extermination, even upon that night he took out on a freight from Philadelphia in fashion so precarious that for once he "had enough, and then some."

The wonder-city of New York held him spellbound; but no astonishment nor admiration could slow down the heated mechanism of his brain. What he saw only caused its wheels to move faster. If he was impressed by the spectacle of the city's incomputable wealth and power, he was stirred even more deeply by the reflection that so mighty a capital should permit the wretchedness of its own East Side.

What must conditions be if New York's cold of winter were as severe as was this smothering torridity, which drove him to spend long afternoons in a green square that gave on Newspaper Row and the city hall? It was some years

before he learned for himself what New York winter meant to the submerged.

He rather enjoyed "battering the main drag" of a morning for nickels and pennies, and found the public not ungenerous. Meantime it was great sport seeing all he could of the promenading bon ton of America. With the money solicited, he lived well, largely on milk, never spending a cent upon liquor unless obliged in chance company. In fact, during all his tramp experience, he avoided drink as much as was compatible with the men he picked as the most worth-while companions. As usual, the crying pity was that the lives t and keenest, most individual and adventurous, were the drinkers. It was proved to him an inescapable truth; and he did not let them know the radical point where they and he differed, which was in his personal antipathy to alcohol as a beverage.

He had enough money left over to buy books from itinerant push-cart men, who vended imperfect volumes culled out by publishers. The serious incident before mentioned, that divided his New York visit in two sections, made him more avid than ever for reading matter. In narrational sequence this incident belongs here; but I have reason for moving it to the end of the chapter.

In that shady square, little booths did a cool trade in sterilized milk and buttermilk at a penny a glass, and we have Jack's word that he "got away with from five to ten glasses each afternoon" in the "dreadfully hot weather," which goes to show where his throat's refreshment lay rather than in alcohol. That he did not surfeit that throat for life I have ample evidence. Particularly do I remember a soft-drink "hole-in-the-wall" in Sydney, where, in 1909, strolling home from theater or organ festival in the great town hall, Jack would stop for a long draft, maybe two or three drafts, toward his unslakable thirst for ice-cold milkshake or buttermilk, in frank preference over any drink dispensed in the mezzanine of the Hotel Australia close by.

Only once in New York did he suffer from contact with the police; and, just as fate would have it, the club thwacked upon his unsuspecting and blameless skull without rhyme or reason that he was ever able to fathom, he being a mere detached spectator of a street-corner row. "Was it always to be that way with—him that he would "get away" with real things he set out to do, and then run into punishment when he happened to be innocent? He could only class the riddle of this New York cop's landing upon him along with that of the Temescal harridan who had taken after him with a butcher knife. Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly oiled her conscience and saved her face by declaring it wasn't a lick amiss, when she once thrashed her nephew undeservedly. But so tireless was Jack in digging to the bottom of human enigmas, that even so trivial elusions as these two bothered him.

The railroad journey to Boston was as full of mishaps as any short trip he made in the East. For one thing, he started in the blaze of a hot Sunday afternoon, catching a freight at Harlem, after bidding farewell to the Bowery and the friendly City Hall Park. I have before me an article entitled "Jack London in Boston," written in Oakland about 1904, and never published in book form. It was the Old Colony Railroad, he thinks, and he was systematically thrown off section after section by zealous shacks, until finally he came to rest inside one of a load of huge iron pipes on a flat-car, "gondóla" in tramp parlance, where he "curled up and read the New York Sunday papers, and, as the light waned, dozed off and regained the sleep lost the previous night in the company of a pessimistic printer out of a job." But the stow-away had been observed by a busy shack who awaited his own convenience to strike the ringing iron and forcibly invite the trespasser to "hit the grit." Jack goes on:

"As behooved a tramp of parts, my mastery of intensive adjectives and vituperative English was such as invariably

to move men in my direction. This was what I desired, and this the shack proceeded to do by crawling in after me. On the outside he controlled both exits (a pipe having two ends), but once inside he surrendered this tactical advantage. So I withdrew by the opposite end, while I bandied words with the man, criticized his general make-up, and dissertated upon the vascular action of the heart and the physiological cataclysms caused by intemperate anger. I also commented upon his ancestry and blackened his genealogical tree.

"I found the town in which I had alighted, on my own feet, which is a nicer way to alight, all things considered, to be Attleboro, a place where the inhabitants solved the scheme of life by manufacturing jewelry. As a traveler and a student of economics and sociology [he had become both by now], it was perhaps my duty to visit those establishments, but I preferred going around to the back doors of the more imposing residences. After breakfasting with a pretty and charming matron, to whom I had never been introduced and with whom I failed to leave my card, I returned to the depot. It was raining, and I sought shelter on the covered platform and rolled a cigarette. This action, being essentially Californian, at once aroused attention, and forthwith I was surrounded by a group of curious idlers. This was in 1894, so I suppose they have in the interim grown sufficiently degenerate to roll their own cig arettes. Nevertheless, I often wonder if any of them recollect the lad with the gray suit and cloth cap, smooth-faced and badly sunburned, who taught them how to do the trick.

"I must be treated leniently if it chanced that I saw but the surface of Boston. Remember, I was without letters of credit or introduction, while my only entrée was the police station. Entertaining peculiar tenets regarding cleanliness," he describes the reputation of Boston jails of the period, "it is not to be wondered that I avoided this place and sought a park bench instead. I wandered hit

or miss till I came to the Common." He comments upon the raw September wind that blows in The Hub around 2 a, m., and says that he shivered and shook, collar pulled up the cap down, vainly trying to sleep, till a policeman tapped him. "Always placate the policeman," he advises the penniless wanderluster. "He is at once the dispenser and obfuscator of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He shapes the destinies of lesser creatures, and free air or dungeon lurk in his gruff 'Move on,' or 'Come on.'" Jack drew upon his histrionic abilities, and simulated mumbling in his sleep. "What?" the officer peremptorily demanded, and Jack answered, Oh, never mind. I wasn't awake yet, and I was dreaming about Ueno Park." He asked, "Where's that?" and Jack replied, "Japan." Then he tells how for two hours he led that policeman's interest uphill and down dale, in Yokohama and Tokio, or Fujiyama, through tea houses and temples the narrator had never seen, bazaar and marketplace, till his listener forgot the municipality he served and the malefactors who feared him. "At the end of that time he discovered that my teeth were chattering, said he was sorry he hadn't any whiskey about him, gave me a silver quarter instead, and departed—he and his club."

Having feasted upon the juicy steak and "Java" the silver quarter made possible, the young rascal spent the rest of the night in the winding streets, trying to get back to the Common, which eluded him for two days. Meantime, he found himself on the bridge to Charlestown, and fell in with one of his fraternity, looking for a residence section that would furnish breakfast.

"'You're no gay cat,' he remarked, after a comprehensive glance.

"I signified in the appropriate terms that such was not my rating, and we unified our pace.

"'New to the town, eh?' he asked. 'How'd you find the

floppings? Pretty crimpy, eh? Well, I know the old jerk like a book, and I'11 put you wise.'"

Yet this tramp was an erstwhile gentleman, Jack soon found out, "with more knowledge and culture under his rags than falls to the average man who sits in the high places." Two days they spent together, and, "discovering an affinity of tastes and studies, discussed the possibilities of a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer, and talked Karl Marx and the German economists, until, in a sort of bashful way, he announced the possession of antiquarian propensities. Thereat I was haled across the bridge to the North End, where he resurrected all manner of architectural antiquities and fairly bubbled with the histories of the old buildings. Needless to speak of my delight in all this, for I was fresh from the 'new and naked lands' of the great West. But I lost him one day, as men will lose comrades on the Eoad, and next picked up with a Dissolute Plumber's Apprentice of Celtic descent and cursed with the Curse of Reuben. He had read Arthur McEwen's 'San Francisco News Letter,' and my heart warmed to him. He was possessed of the modern spirit, exulted in modernity in fact, and bent his efforts toward showing me the latest achieve ments and newest improvements. I remember he took me to the public gymnasiums. And he it was who led my erring feet back to the Common."

But winter was coming on, and Jack's eye was fixed on Montreal and Ottawa. One night Boston turned bitter cold, so he "beat it" for Lawrence, where he forsook his tenets "and slept in the police station" for warmth and shelter.

Tramping for recreation in summer weather was all very well, but once he was in autumnal Canada, neither gorgeous scenery nor new cities could restrain the thinly clad homing vagabond from making the best westward speed consonant with prudence. At Ottawa he succeeded in partly outfitting with an eccentric assortment of winter

garments, but the difficult process and unsatisfactory yield filled him with disgust and haste to be gone from so uncharitable a "burg." It was, he declared, second city to Washington, D. C., where he had for a fortnight vainly begged a pair of shoes. The day in Ottawa he swears he walked forty miles, the reward of his "work" being "shy" of a shirt; while the pair of trousers acquired was tight to absurdity and showed "all the signs of an early disintegration." It was equally hard for a "bo" to extort food; but finally this one obtained a surprisingly large parcel. When hungrily opened in a vacant lot, it turned out to be inexplicably composed of more kinds of cake than he had ever thought possible of man's—or woman's—ingenuity; Cake being the pet aversion of the blowed-in-the-glass stiff, he owns to fairly shedding tears over that "multitudinous pastry. Not yet having cut his eventually large and cavernous sugar-tooth, he declined in choicest idiom to partake of the saccharine muchness. However, at the very next house, his appealing orbs bought him an entirely edible setdown from a beautiful French woman.

Across from Canada he stole passage, the determined train crews granting little margin of repose. It amused him, those thousands of miles of the ten thousand he computed that he covered that year, to attempt overtaking one hobo whose "monaker" of "Skysail Jack," carved with its latest-passing dates along the route, aroused sleeping sea memories. Himself now long since a "comet" and "tramp-royal" in his own right, Jack managed one night to pass the other and keep ahead all across Manitoba, carving or painting his old monaker of "Sailor Jack" for the other's benefit. Then "Skysail" went by also at night, and led across Alberta, always a day in advance. Again our Jack, in company with a member of the old Boo Gang of Oakland who had fallen upon evil times, nearly caught the fleeing "Skysail" somewhere along the Fraser Eiver, in British Columbia; but when he reached Vancouver the jaunty,

elusive sailorman had taken ship across the Western ocean, and never did the two meet.

"Truly, Skysail Jack," his brother-tramp Jack London rendered honor, "you were a tramp-royal, and your mate was the wind that tramps the world."

A week after Jack had crawled out from under a passenger coach in Vancouver, British Columbia, he, too, took passage on his homeland coast waters, stoking his way southward on the Umatilla to San Francisco.

And now for the account of the interruption in his New York sojourn. I place it here in order better to illustrate Jack London's outlook upon his return to California, in relation to immediate issues as regarded their telling weight upon his whole future.

This happening was but the climax to inductions he had already made as corollaries of his entire history to date. It set immovably certain malleable stuff of his being, impelling him to synthesize, out of an extraordinary practical knowledge for one still so young, a simple, forthright philosophy of economics. At least, it appealed to him as the most applicable of any he had found to the anarchic social scheme that had arisen and persisted through Capitalism, and which he could contemplate only as man s shame to man under the free light of heaven.

Jack and the aforementioned fallen member of the Pennsylvania Bar had left Gotham together for a side-jaunt to Niagara Falls. And no one was ever more rapt than Jack London over the incomparable cascade. "Once my eyes were filled with that wonder-vision of down-rushing water, I was lost," he says. Afternoon and sunset, he could not tear himself away. "Night came on, a beautiful night of moonlight," and still he lingered upon that sounding glory of waters. Near midnight, dinnerless except for the feast of beauty, he pulled himself together and looked about for a place to sleep. The night being warm, without covering he slept in the grass of a field. Waking at five, too early to

"batter" for breakfast, still mazed with the splendor of what he had seen overnight, he thought to return to the falls for a couple of hours. In the silent town of Niagara Falls he saw walking toward him three men, apparently hoboes. Two of them were so, and one of the two at close range he knew for his lawyer friend, who had separated from him at the falls in the evening, in the (to him) larger interest of "grub."

Alas for the close range that brought Jack within recognizing distance of the rueful ex-attorney. It was also within nabbing reach of the central figure, an industrious "bull" who, because Jack was unable to name a hotel in a town unfamiliar to him, promptly took him into custody, despite his glib lie that he had just arrived. Into the city jail the trio were marshaled, and searched and registered. Jack's case was the most dubious, for the name he gave, Jack Drake, did not tally with some letters in his pockets that happened to be addressed in his true name. He was never able to recall which was recorded on the blotter.

So far so good, he thought—the town was strict in the matter of vagrants, and he had been hauled in through his own carelessness. He felt a bit sheepish to recollect his mother's warnings. But in court, where he made one of sixteen prisoners, there were no official personages save a judge and a pair of bailiffs—no counsel, no witnesses, NO CHANCE. Simplicity of procedure was all very well; but this clockwork execution of justice outdistanced his utmost dreams of efficacy. The judge called a name. A hobo stood up. A bailiff droned, "Vagrancy, your honor." "Thirty days," enunciated the court, and the hobo sat down while another rose to his name.

And Jack, even he, no milk-and-water stripling innocent of the careless injustice of the world at large, could not believe his ears that were still ringing with the thunderous organ music of Niagara River. He thought of his American school history; of Sir William London's sacrifices

in the cause of freedom; of all his male progenitors down the fighting line for democracy. He reviewed what he could remember of the Constitution of the United States as he had studied it for recitation; and then he dropped back with a thud to the cold, irrefragable fact that his turn was approaching in this chamber of relentless practises.  . . . Bosh, he brought himself up presently; these hoboes were dubs, and deserved all they'd get of the city jail. Hell! he'd show them a few. His ideals recrudesced warm and bright. One of the liberties those ancestors of his had scrapped for was the right of trial by jury. A demand for this could not be denied in any court of law in the Republic of America. Could it not? Why, his own "trial" was ended and the next hobo's begun before Jack could realize that the judge's peremptory "Shut up!" had cut short the blossom of his first sentence that had burst simultaneously with the court's utterance.

He was dazed. "Here was I, under sentence, after a farce of a trial wherein I was denied not only my right of trial by jury, but my right to plead guilty or not guilty."—Habeas corpus! there, he knew about that. So he asked for a lawyer. They laughed at him in the jail corridor. Well, they had him—that judge was the quickest man he had ever tried to talk against. But wait till he got out of jail. He d be good as gold while inside—it paid; and he was a diplomat, even if he did sometimes nap. But let him once get out, and there'd be the biggest noise and odor of a scandal that ever was let loose in the uninformed press of the U. S. A.

Jail? It turned out to be not mere jail but Penitentiary stripes for all the sixteen, the only offense of the most of whom had been homelessness. Jack, erstwhile patriotic son of a patriotic veteran, was handcuffed small white wrist to big black paw of a huge, happy-go-lucky negro, equally guiltless of felony, and placed in the very vanguard

of the beaten procession that marched to the train for Buffalo.

Please, I beg, picture it, just once and honestly, anyone of you who fought to impede Jack London, man and artist, every hard-won, invincible inch of his way until your tardy homage only bent at last to tired eyes and lips closed in death. Just once and honestly, I beg, put yourself in the fine skin of that burning young patriot being unmade because men were needed for the rock-pile. Then, just once and honestly, do you marvel that patriotism took on new lineaments in his ideal? For the rest of his life, until Mexico and Germania threatened his country, Jack London's only tender connotation of the word patriotism as applied to capitalist civilization was the fact that his father and mine were single-minded veterans of Abraham Lincoln's victorious forces.

Talk about sudden conversions at the Mercy Seat! He had pretended them, even striven to experience them, more than once at revivals, but had emerged spiritually untouched. But here in New York State there was no mercy. And the ruling class of America, finally, upon that day of ultimate outrage to his logic and his sensibilities, through its own uncaring stupidity forfeited that which might have become an ornament to itself, what of Jack London's temperamental leaning toward the excellence of strength. It was of such a being as this exuberant, protest ing boy, that one who has been acclaimed Dean of American Letters, many years afterward, even in the face of favors received, declared: "Jack London is a self-confessed felon, and ought to be behind the bars to-day."

That he was not made into a dangerous criminal, as were many of his chance mates, was not due to the masters. His brain and eye missed no iota of cruel wrong of the penal institution in itself and in its administration. His common sense that made him from moment to moment follow the lead of the wiser convicts to the playing of politics

that in short order created him a trusty—these faculties enabled him to convert the month of durance into a powerful ally of mental growth. With customary abandon he gave himself to the game, and went observing instant by instant.

Here, to be sure, he might have been deflected into a consideration of the wisdom of eliminating the unfit, which would have led him to the pursuance whole-souled of oligarchy's high awards. It was the hot heart of him that interposed before the cool weighing of his reason, and he would make no terms with the enemy of the underdog. But true to his quality, that abiding saneness just as uncompromisingly determined that he scale the social shambles he saw butchering the careers of unprophetic or indolent comrades. Although he honored the martyrs of old, their method could never be for him. He would himself first climb out of the pit, that he might live to reach a hand to the fellow who could not rise by himself.

One may thank that princely ego of Jack London's which triumphed to serve, that there was any boyhood left in him when he had doffed the stripes and emerged shaven headed from the great gray house where he had been consigned by the majesty of Niagara Falls police court. And he had learned how best to serve both himself and those still incarcerated, which was by making himself, upon his release, very small in the matter of immediate protest. Loud mouthed ones discharged during his own occupancy of a cell, had shortly returned very silent and very sore. So he walked exceeding soft; exceeding quietly he stole under the first New York and Pennsylvania train bound southeast. More carefully than all else did he avoid coming within tagging reach of any cop in Buffalo, for amongst other teachers in the "pen" were the men who had served their thirty days for vagrancy and run forthwith again into the winnowing arms of the same or other officers. Some had

been committed a second and third time, according to their degree of stupidity.

Remembering the monstrous cruelties of the penitentiary in the course of administering criminal "justice," Jack not unnaturally concluded all State prisons were alike. It became almost second-nature for him to take to nimble heels whenever a policeman hove in sight. In the "pen" he had soon ceased from cursing his failure to jump out that morning in Niagara Falls, because of the tremendous eye-opener the prison was to him upon the nether-scenes of society. Nothing could better exhibit the rottenness of the social structure than this mad manhandling of human potentialities, in need rather of wise physicians for mental as well as physical deficiencies. Jack, being essentially healthy, shook himself free as of yore from the unnormality of the thing, and went on his way rejoicing in escape. But this time it was with a deeper difference than ever before. Read in "The Road" his two sections entitled "Pinched" and "The Pen," for a hint of what he calls the "unprintable" details of what with his own eyes he saw in the Erie County Penitentiary in 1894. "They were unthinkable to me until I saw them," he avows, "and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation."

"When Jack this time passed homeward through the Golden Gate of the West, it was eyes front to the exigencies of his future; and there was a new look in those eyes—wide, grave, imperious. He had figured it out, once and for all. He had been wont to glorify his beautiful youth's muscle and "silk." Where had it got him? What had it bought him? Where would it land him? Tell him that! Each time he had tried it out, he, fit among the fit, had been exploited for a paltry wage—or none, when it came to a penitentiary rock-pile. Being obsessed with love of life that should go with such a physique, he confessed

terror as to what would happen when he grew older and had lost his silk, whenas he should be "unable to work shoulder to shoulder with the strong." The vaunted dignity of manual labor, as he had heard it expounded by teacher and preacher and politician, suffered a total eclipse. He had informed himself as to the doings in the cellar-pit of society. These had shown him that the men without trades were helpless, and the ones with trades were obliged to belong to unions in order to work at those trades. Unions were forced to maintain constant war with employers unions, which came back at them in turn. Therefore, no trade for him and no criminality either. He would work up out of the pit, but not with his muscle. In short, brains paid, properly used, and not brawn. His economic interpretations sanctioned the decision, for himself, that brain, and brain only, would he sell.

Here he might have switched to the track taken by the hero he created in "Martin Eden," and become technically an aristocrat, with little care for those he was easily superior enough to leave in the shambles. But no; he would use his potent intelligence to double purpose. His choice, and the use he put it to, are the most eloquent illustrations of his nobility and integrity.

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