As that big Newfoundland behaved at the plate of my dog Punch, so behaved I at the table of those two maiden ladies of Harrisburg.  I swept it bare.  I didn’t break anything, but I cleaned out the eggs and the toast and the coffee.  The servant brought more, but I kept her busy, and ever she brought more and more.  The coffee was delicious, but it needn’t have been served in such tiny cups.  What time had I to eat when it took all my time to prepare the many cups of coffee for drinking?

At any rate, it gave my tongue time to wag.  Those two maiden ladies, with their pink-and-white complexions and gray curls, had never looked upon the bright face of adventure.  As the “Tramp-Royal” would have it, they had worked all their lives “on one same shift.”  Into the sweet scents and narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils.  And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—­the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles.  This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon their charity.

Ah, I can see them now, those dear, sweet ladies, just as I sat at their breakfast table twelve years ago, discoursing upon the way of my feet in the world, brushing aside their kindly counsel as a real devilish fellow should, and thrilling them, not alone with my own adventures, but with the adventures of all the other fellows with whom I had rubbed shoulders and exchanged confidences.  I appropriated them all, the adventures of the other fellows, I mean; and if those maiden ladies had been less trustful and guileless, they could have tangled me up beautifully in my chronology.  Well, well, and what of it?  It was fair exchange.  For their many cups of coffee, and eggs, and bites of toast, I gave full value.  Right royally I gave them entertainment.  My coming to sit at their table was their adventure, and adventure is beyond price anyway.

Coming along the street, after parting from the maiden ladies, I gathered in a newspaper from the doorway of some late-riser, and in a grassy park lay down to get in touch with the last twenty-four hours of the world.  There, in the park, I met a fellow-hobo who told me his life-story and who wrestled with me to join the United States Army.  He had given in to the recruiting officer and was just about to join, and he couldn’t see why I shouldn’t join with him.  He had been a member of Coxey’s Army in the march to Washington several months before, and that seemed to have given him a taste for army life.  I, too, was a veteran, for had I not been a private in Company L of the Second Division of Kelly’s Industrial Army?—­said Company L being commonly known as the “Nevada push.”  But my army experience had had the opposite effect on me; so I left that hobo to go his way to the dogs of war, while I “threw my feet” for dinner.