crabbed, generous or miserly, good-natured or cantankerous, Jew or
Gentile, black or white, race-prejudiced or brotherly, provincial or
universal, or whatever else it may be. I have often thought that to
this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a
story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was
compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of
inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity
laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I
quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out
of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the
kitchen door for grub.

After all, art is only consummate artfulness, and artfulness saves
many a "story." I remember lying in a police station at Winnipeg,
Manitoba. I was bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Of course, the
police wanted my story, and I gave it to them--on the spur of the
moment. They were landlubbers, in the heart of the continent, and what
better story for them than a sea story? They could never trip me up on
that. And so I told a tearful tale of my life on the hell-ship
_Glenmore_. (I had once seen the _Glenmore_ lying at anchor in San
Francisco Bay.)

I was an English apprentice, I said. And they said that I didn't talk
like an English boy. It was up to me to create on the instant. I had
been born and reared in the United States. On the death of my parents,
I had been sent to England to my grandparents. It was they who had
apprenticed me on the _Glenmore_. I hope the captain of the _Glenmore_
will forgive me, for I gave him a character that night in the Winnipeg
police station. Such cruelty! Such brutality! Such diabolical
ingenuity of torture! It explained why I had deserted the _Glenmore_