ing-House." The Greasy
Spoon had peace, but peace is not enough. After peace comes prosperity.
The Pie House represented prosperity. For the woman who ran it knew how
to make more pies than the fellows ever heard of. You see, we were all
from the British Isles where they have pudding. The pie is an American
institution. Nobody knows how to make pies but an American housewife.
And lucky that she does, for men can not thrive in America without
pie. I do not mean the standardized, tasteless things made in great pie
factories. I refer to the personally conducted pies that women used to
make. The pioneer wives of America learned to make a pie out of every
fruit that grows, including lemons, and from many vegetables, including
squash and sweet potatoes, as well as from vinegar and milk and eggs and
flour. Fed on these good pies the pioneers--is there any significance
in the first syllable of the word--hewed down the woods and laid the
continent under the plow. Some men got killed and their widows started
boarding-houses. Here we workers fed on proper pie, and we soon changed
this wooden land into a land of iron. Now the pie is passing out and we
are feeding on French pastry. Is our downfall at hand?

Life in the Pie Boarding-House was a never-ending delight. You never
knew when you sat down at the table what kind of pie would be dealt you.
Some of the fellows had been there half a year and swore that they had
seen fifty-seven varieties and were expecting new ones at any meal. The
crowd here was a selected crowd. It was made up of the pie connoisseurs
of mill-town. Word was quietly passed out among the wisest fellows to
move to this boarding-house and get a liberal education in pie. So it
was a selected and well-behaved crowd. They didn't want to start any
rumpus and thus lose their places at this attractive table.

And that is one way that virtue is its own reward. Only the well-behaved
fellows were tipped off to the pie bonanza. From this I learned that the
better manners you have, the better fare you will get in this world.
I had steadily risen from the "Bucket of Blood," through the "Greasy
Spoon" to a seat at the cherished "Pie" table. Here the cups were so
thin that you couldn't break a man's head with them. I was steadily
rising in the social world.

CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP

It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached
rock bottom. In the depth of this indust