THE SLEEPER IN THE OPEN AIR. T HERE are, perhaps, few
offences committed daily—or rather nightly—which seem to the average person to call for lighter punishment than the offence of "sleeping out, and being without visible means of subsistence." If a man has no visible means of subsistence, how is he to get a bed under a roof ? and if he may not sleep except under a roof, how is he to sleep at all ? Sleep being a thing which it is clear that every man must have, the kindly minded critic of magisterial decisions wonders whether he, if he were brought so low as to be compelled to trudge through the dark till a friendly haystack offered shelter, would not rail bitterly against a law that offered him, as the only alternative to a night in the casual ward, the roof of a prison. There is, of course, a good deal of false sentiment wasted over the tramp, who, generally speaking, is a worthless person, and quite capable of looking after himself, even to the extent of extorting half-crowns under pressure from frightened women. But, nefarious creature though he doubtless often is, somehow or other he always does appeal vaguely to the imagination of sympathetic people
_when he may not sleep out of doors. However, the com- munity has decided against him; the sun goes down, and it is necessary to make as sure as possible that he shall no be planning mischief in the dark.
Does the tramp himself look on sleeping out of doors as something desirable in itself, or does he merely regard it as a disagreeable business, preferable to the alternative necessity of knocking at the door of the workhouse ? Does he find any deep pleasure in contemplating the idea of lying down when the mood takes him, sleeping his sleep out in the wind and dew, and waking in the cool air of an August morning? Except for a dull sense of satisfaction that he is still a free man, probably the average tramp thinks very little of pleasure in connection with the notion of sleeping on the bare ground. One day is very like another, taking everything together, and it will make very little difference to him whether the next morning brings rain or sun. The main point ever present is that the world, to his mind, treats him unjustly. It insists that he must work to live, that he must always be able to give references, and—most unjust of all—must always have cash in his pocket, and mash which he can prove has been properly come by. Why should he be compelled to do all these things, and fall in with all these regulations ? He merely wishes to get through life as easily and as pleasantly as he can, and sees no sense in working or paying for a bed in a house, where he will be trammelled with all sorts of rules and assertions of authority, when he can get to sleep in the open air for nothing. He is useless and may be dangerous, but he is perfectly logical and practical,—too practical, indeed, to care very much whether he sleeps in a dirty out-house or on green heather. The main thing is to get the night over.
Still, there must be a sprinkling among the tramps who shuffle dully to gaol for sleeping out in the hot weather of men whose spirits really belong to the outdoor world, to whom four brick walls are a trap or a prison, to whom the wind on clean hills and wild roads is the breath of life, who have something of the same lonely, rebellious mind that sent George Borrow striding and fighting along country lanes. How curious it is, by the way, that George Borrow actually shrank from the idea of his first night sleeping out alone. When he bought Jack Slingaby's pony and cart and tent for five pounds ten shillings, and let the pony take him where it pleased off the high road, he had intended at first to pass the night in the cart, or to pitch his tent at some convenient spot by the roadside. But a cold wind sprang up, followed by a drizzling rain, and " to tell the truth," he writes, "I was not very sorry to have an excuse to pass the night once more beneath a roof. I had determined to live quite independent, but I had never passed a night alone by myself abroad, and felt a little appre- hensive at the idea ; I hoped, however, on the morrow, to be a little more prepared for the step, so I determined for one night—only for one night longer—to sleep like a Christian." He went on, but never came to a house or an inn, and at last pitched his tent, conveyed one or two articles into it, "and instantly felt that I had commenced housekeeping for the first time in my life." He was quite as practical and humdrum the next morning. He refuses, bluffly, "to say that I was awakened in the morning by the carolling of birds, as I perhaps might if I were writing a novel; I awoke because, to use vulgar language, I had slept my sleep out, not because the birds were carolling in numbers round me, as they had probably been for hours without my hearing them." Nor would he have noticed particularly, perhaps, what birds were singing, or have cared very much whether they sang at all. To live and speak and strive with men in the open air was Borrow's idea of life; the face and features of Nature, which are not plain, reasonable matters at all, interested him a good deal less.
He writes vaguely and generally of " the birds," and the morning on which he wakes might, for all that those few lines tell you, belong to any month from April to October. But even taking the song of birds alone, how differently the world wakes during the succeeding months for the sleeper in the open air. The thrush first, on March mornings, piping wildly to the gale half-an-hour before daylight; the robin just after dawn; and the blackbird merely chattering and clattering, —his " boxwood lute" is not in tune in cold weather. May mornings, perhaps, ring with the most wonderful anthem of the year,—an anthem-which, strangely. enough, only one man in a hundred takes the trouble to hear. It is, indeed, less an anthem than a continuous, passionate shout; madness and deaf- ness are the two first thoughts it prompts, followed always by wonder when it ceases as suddenly as it began, and doubt whether you ever beard it after all. so unlike is it to any other sound of birds singing. But if the nightingales and thrushes and blackbirds wake madly in May and June, is there any month in which the dawn breaks more tranquilly than inthe calm of a hot August? No Englishman knows all that EngliSh weather means until he has seen the morning gradually lift over some great expanse of open country, such as Eimoor or Salisbury Plain. And to see that sight in its full majesty, in the wealth of a light morning wind playing over wide fields and hills, he must sleep on the ground, and wake to find his head level with grey grass and thistles,—grass that lighten s into pale yellow and thistles that glow into, pink as the indigo fades out of the sky, and the thinnest ultramarine haze hangs beyond the barrows on the sky-line. He can reach out and pick within an arm's-length of his bed crow's-foot and .weod- raff and harebells, bending and bowing in the sun-parched, amber grass-bents ; beloW him; in flat valleys, partridges are calling to their chicks; twenty larks in half-a-mile are singing as they sang in March. The yellow-grey grass sweeps away in curved, rolling carpets to fields of swedes and wheat ona distant hill; beyond a spinney of beech he watches thin lines of sheep wander slowly over the brow. The sup blazes out to dry the dew, and from a hill spotted with tiny white tents there suddenly comes down the wind. the sound of four bugles, "like horns of elf-land, faintly blowing,"—a sound echoed nearer him by other bugles, joyous and flamboyant, magnetic with the blue morning air. A strange reflection, surely, that the average Englishman heaiu and sees those sounds and sights seldom of his own free will. His holidays take.him to Swiss mountains and Italian lak4, to look at something new. Yet he can find something abso- lutely new at his hand without crossing any sea; .a.fact whiCh he realises when, perhaps merely in the capacity of a Volunteer soldier marched to Salisbury Plain and back again, he has been brought to see the sun rise over English hills,—almost under compulsion.
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