Title:  Tramping on Life An Autobiographical Narrative

Author:  Harry Kemp

Release Date:  March 19, 2005 [EBook #15415]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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[Illustration:  The author of Tramping on Life]

TRAMPING ON LIFE

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

HARRY KEMP

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

Garden city publishing company, Inc.

Copyright, 1922, by

Boni and LIVERIGHT, Inc.

First Printing, September, 1922

Second Printing, November, 1922

Third Printing, January, 1923

Fourth Printing, April, 1923

Fifth Printing, July, 1923

Sixth Printing, September, 1923

Seventh Printing, November, 1923

Eighth Printing, May, 1924

Ninth Printing, November, 1924

Tenth Printing, July, 1925

Eleventh Printing, March, 1926

Twelfth Printing, February, 1927

Printed in the United States of America

All in this book that is good and enduring and worth while for humanity, I dedicate to the memory of my wife,

MARY PYNE

Waterbury, Connecticut, May 20, 1922.

TRAMPING ON LIFE

Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.  For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother.  Consumption ran in her family.  And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness in her.  She was not even strong enough to suckle me.

* * * * *

I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor country,—­but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.

* * * * *

They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in Mornington.  She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready for a flirtation....