Page 225 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

duroy suit, scarf, and cap—no socks or linen. Still, he was
fat and jolly, and he even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell
in a tramp nowadays.
Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently,
and they told a ghost story connected with it. Years earli-
er, they said, there had been a suicide there. A tramp had
managed to smuggle a razor into his cell, and there cut his
throat. In the morning, when the Tramp Major came round,
the body was jammed against the door, and to open it they
had to break the dead man’s arm. In revenge for this, the
dead man haunted his cell, and anyone who slept there was
certain to die within the year; there were copious instances,
of course. If a cell door stuck when you tried to open it, you
should avoid that cell like the plague, for it was the haunted
one.
Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man
(they swore they had known him) had planned to stow away
on a boat bound for Chile. It was laden with manufactured
goods packed in big wooden crates, and with the help of a
docker the stowaway had managed to hide himself in one of
these. But the docker had made a mistake about the order
in which the crates were to be loaded. The crane gripped
the stowaway, swung him aloft, and deposited him—at the
very bottom of the hold, beneath hundreds of crates. No one
discovered what had happened until the end of the voyage,
when they found the stowaway rotting, dead of suffoca-
tion.
Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish
robber. Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be

Down and Out in Paris and London