But that something to eat was a hard proposition.  I was “turned down” at a dozen houses.  Sometimes I received insulting remarks and was informed of the barred domicile that should be mine if I had my just deserts.  The worst of it was that such assertions were only too true.  That was why I was pulling west that night.  John Law was abroad in the town, seeking eagerly for the hungry and homeless, for by such was his barred domicile tenanted.

At other houses the doors were slammed in my face, cutting short my politely and humbly couched request for something to eat.  At one house they did not open the door.  I stood on the porch and knocked, and they looked out at me through the window.  They even held one sturdy little boy aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the tramp who wasn’t going to get anything to eat at their house.

It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor for my food.  The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the hungry tramp.  The very poor can always be depended upon.  They never turn away the hungry.  Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor.  Oh, you charity-mongers!  Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable.  They neither give nor withhold from their excess.  They have no excess.  They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves.  A bone to the dog is not charity.  Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.

There was one house in particular where I was turned down that evening.  The porch windows opened on the dining room, and through them I saw a man eating pie—­a big meat-pie.  I stood in the open door, and while he talked with me, he went on eating.  He was prosperous, and out of his prosperity had been bred resentment against his less fortunate brothers.

He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, “I don’t believe you want to work.”

Now this was irrelevant.  I hadn’t said anything about work.  The topic of conversation I had introduced was “food.”  In fact, I didn’t want to work.  I wanted to take the westbound overland that night.

“You wouldn’t work if you had a chance,” he bullied.

I glanced at his meek-faced wife, and knew that but for the presence of this Cerberus I’d have a whack at that meat-pie myself.  But Cerberus sopped himself in the pie, and I saw that I must placate him if I were to get a share of it.  So I sighed to myself and accepted his work-morality.

“Of course I want work,” I bluffed.

“Don’t believe it,” he snorted.

“Try me,” I answered, warming to the bluff.