and he had made enough at the _Appeal_ to supply his
immediate wants. Besides, among the people he had always associated with
it was considered a very right and necessary thing to be honest. Men
were arrested for not being. He remembered one very sad case of a boy he
knew being arrested at Alexandria for breaking into a store at night.
That seemed a terrible thing to him at the time. Since then he had been
speculating a great deal, in a vague way as to what honesty was, but he
had not yet decided. He knew that it was expected of him to account for
the last penny of anything that was placed in his keeping and he was
perfectly willing to do so. The money he earned seemed enough if he had
to live on it. There was no need for him to aid in supporting anyone
else. So he slipped along rather easily and practically untested.

Eugene took the first day's package of bills as laid out for him, and
carefully went from door to door. In some places money was paid him for
which he gave a receipt, in others he was put off or refused because of
previous difficulties with the company. In a number of places people had
moved, leaving no trace of themselves, and packing the unpaid for goods
with them. It was his business, as Mr. Mitchly explained, to try to get
track of them from the neighbors.

Eugene saw at once that he was going to like the work. The fresh air,
the out-door life, the walking, the quickness with which his task was
accomplished, all pleased him. His routes took him into strange and new
parts of the city, where he had never been before, and introduced him to
types he had never met. His laundry work, taking him from door to door,
had been a freshening influence, and this was another. He saw scenes
that he felt sure he could, when he had learned to draw a little better,
make great things of,--dark, towering factory-sites, great stretches of
railroad yards laid out like a puzzle in rain, snow, or bright sunlight;
great smoke-stacks throwing their black heights athwart morning or
evening skies. He liked them best in the late afternoon when they stood
out in a glow of red or fading purple. "Wonderful," he used to exclaim
to himself, and think how the world would marvel if he could ever come
to do great pictures like those of Dore. He admired the man's tremendous
imagination. He never thought of himself as doing anything in oils or
water colors or chalk--only pen and ink, and that in great, rude
splotches of black and white. Tha