“The Hobo—­” He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles while he cast his definition.  “The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.  The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history.  Hautbois—­there’s the French of it.  Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood.  In English it becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact.  You remember in ’Henry IV’—­

    “’The case of a treble hautboy
     Was a mansion for him, a court.’

“From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used the terms interchangeably.  But—­and mark you, the leap paralyzes one—­crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy, becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known.  In a way one understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and musical fellows.  But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!  The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man without caste!  And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically, it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp.  Then, as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo.  Wherefore, the large stone and brick cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo.  Interesting, isn’t it?”

And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man, this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and discriminating eye.

He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic Foundation of Society.”

“I like to talk with you,” he remarked.  “You are not indifferently schooled.  You’ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of history, as you choose to call it” (this with a sneer), “eminently fits you for an intellectual outlook on life.  But your sociologic judgments are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge.  Now I, who know the books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too.  I have lived it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it, the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have been biased by neither passion nor prejudice.  All of which is necessary for clear concepts, and all of which you lack.  Ah! a really clever passage.  Listen!”

And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject, introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—­in short, flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and lifeless.