he buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when
he sighted the noble _Times_ Building and struck out for Broadway (the
magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story
shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a
job--then he found the gateway of wonder.

But he did not find a job.

Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel;
tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted
of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile
accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening
paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity
Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.

In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and
filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl
waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a
keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for
work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give.
He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.

This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First
Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee
with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white
jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was
too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed
table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a
freight next day and get out of town.

He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked
of disinfectants and charity.

* * * * *

The East Side of New York. A whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering
shadows. The jargon of Jewish matrons in brown shawls and orthodox
wigs, chaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray
woolen undershirts with excitable push-cart proprietors who had beards
so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid
the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher
meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable
to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements
that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled
fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of
Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-poi