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Moon-Face and Other Stories (The Collected Works of Jack London
Moon-Face and Other Stories The Collected Works of Jack London Author:Jack London Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LOCAL COLOR "T DO not see why you should not turn this I immense amount of unusual information to account," I told him. "Unlike most men equipped with similar... more » knowledge, you have expression. Your style is —" "Is sufficiently — er — journalese ? " he interrupted suavely. "Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny." But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and dismissed the subject. 'I have tried it. It does not pay." "It was paid for and published," he added, after a pause. "And I was also honored with sixty days in the Hobo." "The Hobo?" I ventured. "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 chapter{Section 4name 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 a...« less