ity and build a happy city where all the children
of their stricken comrades could be sent to school together, there to
learn that man is moral, that the strong do not destroy the weak, that
the nestling is not left to fate, but that the fatherless are fathered
by all men whose hearts have heard their cry.

This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had seen the
children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from a smitten tree
never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof to be buffeted about by
strikes and unemployment, and I feared that our home would be lost and
my brothers scattered forever. The voice of hate was whispering that the
"classes" would ride down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy
thought I went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was
journeying to a mill town in a freight car.

As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men
going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well
as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to
overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children
how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The
city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands.
And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless
children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each
child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but
which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever
entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I
feared I could not hope to realize.

CHAPTER XXIV. JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN

A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted
at me:

"Where're you going?"

"Birmingham," I answered.

"What have you got to go on?"

I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the
boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from
my vest pocket and said:

"This is all I've got left."

The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told
him that it was a fine gold watch. "All right," he said as he pocketed
it and went away. I never knew whether I cheated the brakeman or the
brakeman cheated me. The watch wasn't worth as much as the ride, but the
ride wasn't his to sell.

I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A fake auction in a pawnshop
attracted my