"Live somewhere, and not go tramping round the country all the time. It would be a good deal pleasanter."
"Not for me. I'm a vagrant by nature. I can't be cooped up in one place. I should die of stagnation. I come of a roving stock. My mother and father before me were rovers, and I follow in their steps."
The man spoke with animation, his eye flashing as he gazed about him, and unconsciously quickened his pace.
"Then, I'm not like you," said Tony, decidedly. "I don't want to be a tramp. Were my father and mother rovers like yours?"
"Of course they were," answered Rudolph, but not without hesitation. "Ain't I your uncle?"
"I don't know. Are you?" returned Tony, searchingly.
"Haven't I told you so a hundred times?" demanded Rudolph, impatiently.
"Yes," said the boy, slowly, "but there's no likeness between us. You're dark and I am light."
"That proves nothing," said the elder tramp, hastily. "Brothers are often as unlike. Perhaps you don't want to look upon me as a relation?"
"Are you getting ashamed of me?" demanded Rudolph, in a harsh tone.
"I am ashamed of myself," said Tony, bitterly. "I'm nothing but a tramp, begging my bread from door to door, sleeping in barns, outhouses, in the fields, anywhere I can. I'm as ignorant as a boy of eight. I can just read and that's all."
"That don't satisfy me. When I grow up I don't want to be----"
"You don't want to be like me. Is that it?" asked Rudolph, angrily.
"No, I don't want to be like you," answered Tony, boldly. "I want to have a home, and a business, and to live like other people."
"Humph!" muttered Rudolph, fixing his eyes thoughtfully upon his young companion. "This is something new. You never talked like that before."
"But I've felt like that plenty of times. I'm tired of being a tramp."
"Then you're a fool. There's no life so free and independent. You can go where you please, with no one to order you here nor there, the scene changing always, instead of being obliged to look always upon the same people and the same fields."
"What's the good of it all? I'm tired of it. I've got no home, and never had any."
"You've got no spirit. You're only fit for a farm-boy or an apprentice."
"Sit down here if you are tired," said the man, abruptly, throwing himself down under a wide-spreading tree by the roadside.