When toward evening we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted in barely filling two of the little carts, and we had earned, if I recollect aright, something like sixty cents each.  The fall of the roof robbed us of all desire to try mining again....

Up the railroad track I went, and at night hired out to a truck farmer, with the freedom of his hay-mow for my sleeping quarters.  But when I had hoed cucumbers three days in a scorching sun, till my back ached as if it were going to break, and the farmer guessed he would call it square for three shillings, I went farther.  A man is not necessarily a philanthropist, it seems, because he tills the soil.  I did not hire out again.  I did odd jobs to earn my meals, and slept in the fields at night....

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.

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 woolen blanket in my trunk which I had from home—­the one, my mother had told me, in which I was wrapped when I was born; but the trunk was in the ‘hotel’ as security for money I owed for board, and I asked for it in vain.  I was now too shabby to get work, even if there had been any to get.  I had letters still to friends of my family in New York who might have helped me, but hunger and want had not conquered my pride.  I would come to them, if at all, as their equal, and, lest I fall into temptation, I destroyed the letters.  So, having burned my bridges behind me, I was finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured.