Word: vagabonder
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...natural good spirits, the Vagabond has been feeling of late that the ruby of the sunset was only a garnet and the emerald of the sea was but green glass. He has suffered from the "weariness the fever, and the fret. Here, where men sit and hear each other groan." He has sought comradeship in vain. The Jester has been in seclusion, incubating puns on the Shanghai situation. George Bernard Shaw has climbed off the apple cart to mount the band-wagon of reform (thereby adding another name to the firm of Wells, Russell, and Mencken, Ltd., Odd-jobbers Specializing...
Once, when he was in the Grade Schools, the Vagabond was found carefully engraving a heart, embracing appropriate initials, on the cover of his desk. The knife is now lost, the owner of the initials is now forgotten, along with a hundred others, but what the teacher said still rings in his ears as loudly and crassly as the day when first she said it. The phrase she used is so old as to be termed a "saw", "Fools names like fools faces oft are seen in public places". Not very funny, not very new, but biting...
There was something sad and sentimental about all these names. They left behind a tale all their own, a tale half finished and inarticulate. Vaguely, the Vagabond thought of Gray in his church yard erecting for himself false gods. How many of these craftsmen had gone out to live unwept, unhonored, and unsung. How many had left only crude initials to tell the world that they had lived. How many, when looking back through the years, must feel that the only lance that they had broken in the tournament of life was a penknife on a Holworthy dado. But there...
...Vagabond's mind ran on until it reached the present. What could the inmates of a house plan upon departing leave behind them? What footprints on the sands of time? Would a man dare to touch the smooth serenity of a Dunster fireplace? Could he scrawl on H. A. Q. '32 upon a new white slab. Alas, what chance has any man to leave behind him a little unremembered act, to write his name upon the panels of the future? Such are the penalties of sophistication, such the trials of luxury. Men will come, remain, and depart like the seal...
Germany and Italy both, were moulded in the fires of revolution. But while Garibaldi defended the Janiculum and Manin led Venice to starving martyrdom, Germany talked and blustered and Bismarck had his way. Perhaps in no other gathering in the history of the world would the Vagabond have been so at home as at the National Parliament which met at Frankfort to create a united Germany, and which dispersed in the face of armed fact. There he could have satisfied his lust for unlimited declamation. Cheated of his heritage by a trick of Fate, he can at least assuage...