wisdom and grace.
I am afraid that I was not over-burdened with either, or I might have
gone to bed with a full stomach, too, instead of chewing the last of
the windfall apples that had been my diet on my two days' trip; but if
he slept as peacefully under the slab as I slept on it, he was doing
well. I had for once a dry bed, and brownstone keeps warm long after
the sun has set. The night dews and the snakes, and the dogs that kept
sniffing and growling half the night in the near distance, had made me
tired of sleeping in the fields. The dead were much better company.
They minded their own business, and let a fellow alone. . . .

[He found no employment in New Brunswick and after six weeks in a
neighboring brickyard he returned to New York, to be again disappointed
in an effort to enlist.]

The city was full of idle men. My last hope, a promise of employment
in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined
the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime
with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my
vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as
miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or
doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I
ever did. But I remember well a basement window at the downtown
Delmonico's, the silent appearance of my ravenous face at which, at a
certain hour in the evening, always evoked a generous supply of
meat-bones and rolls from a white-capped cook who spoke French. That
was the saving clause. I accepted his rolls as installment of the debt
his country owed me, or ought to owe me, for my unavailing efforts in
its behalf.

It was under such auspices that I made the acquaintance of Mulberry
Bend, the Five Points, and the rest of the slums, with which there was
in the years to come to be a reckoning. . . .

There was until last winter a doorway in Chatham Square, that of the
old Barnum clothing store, which I could never pass without recalling
those nights of hopeless misery with the policeman's periodic "Get up
there! Move on!" reinforced by a prod of his club or the toe of his
boot. I slept there, or tried to, when crowded out of the tenements in
the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold and wet weather had set in,
and a linen duster was all that covered my back. There was a woollen
blanket in my trunk which I had from home--the one, my mother had told