NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
1895
There are gentlemen vagabonds and vagabond gentlemen. Here and there onefinds a vagabond pure and simple, and once in a lifetime one meets agentleman simple and pure.
Without premeditated intent or mental bias, I have unconsciously tomyself selected some one of these several types,—entangling them in thethreads of the stories between these covers.
Each of my readers can group them to suit his own experience.
F.H.S.
NEW YORK,
150 E. 34TH ST.
I found the major standing in front of Delmonico's, interviewing a large,bare-headed personage in brown cloth spotted with brass buttons. The majorwas in search of his very particular friend, Mr. John Hardy of MadisonSquare, and the personage in brown and brass was rather languidlyindicating, by a limp and indecisive forefinger, a route through a sectionof the city which, correctly followed, would have landed the major in theEast River.
I knew him by the peculiar slant of his slouch hat, the rosy glow of hisface, and the way in which his trousers clung to the curves of hiswell-developed legs, and ended in a sprawl that half covered his shoes. Irecognized, too, a carpet-bag, a ninety-nine-cent affair, an "occasion,"with galvanized iron clasps and paper-leather sides,—the kind opened withyour thumb.
The major—or, to be more definite, Major Tom Slocomb of Pocomoke—wasfrom one of the lower counties of the Chesapeake. He was supposed to own,as a gift from his dead wife, all that remained unmortgaged of a vastcolonial estate on Crab Island in the bay, consisting of several thousandacres of land and water,—mostly water,—a manor house, once paintedwhite, and a number of outbuildings in various stages of dilapidation anddecay.
In his early penniless life he had migrated from his more northern nativeState, settled in the county, and, shortly after his arrival, had marriedthe relict of the late lamented Major John Talbot of Pocomoke. This hadbeen greatly to the surprise of many eminent Pocomokians, who boasted ofthe purity and antiquity of the Talbot blood, and who could not look on insilence, and see it degraded and diluted by an alliance with a "harfstrainer or worse." As one possible Talbot heir put it, "a picayune,low-down corncracker, suh, without blood or breedin'."
The objections were well taken. So far as the ancestry of the Slocombfamily was concerned, it was a trifle indefinite. It really could not betraced back farther than the day of the major's arrival at Pocomoke,notwithstanding the major's several claims that his ancestors came overin the M