My district was on the East Side from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Street.  I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in this region—­so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its work.  I copied its “bill-of-fare” from the board outside the door, and began, as time permitted, to attend its services.  As an offset to the discouragements I had experienced, I met in this small church two big men—­big, mentally and morally.  They were brothers, and during my twenty-one years in the United States, I have not met their superiors.  They were Lincoln and Frank Moss, both of them leaders in the church, and although they had moved with the population northward, they remembered the struggles of their childhood, and gave to it some of their best manhood.

Selling sewing machines was a failure, but out of it came the discovery of this splendid field for social and religious activity.  I was directed to the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A.  There, day after day, I inquired at the Employment Department until the secretary seemed tired of the sight of me.

I got ashamed to look at him.  One night I sat in a corner, the picture of dejection and despair, when a big, broad-shouldered man sat down beside me.

“You look as if you thought God was dead!” he said, smiling.

“He appears to be,” I replied.

He put his big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out of me my story.  I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of hope and courage.  Before leaving that night I approached the little man at the employment desk.

“Did you see that big fellow in a gray suit?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. McBurney.”

“The man whose name is on your letterhead?”

“The same.”

“Great guns! and to think that I’ve been monkeying all these weeks with a man like you—­pardon me, brother!”

Robert R. McBurney was my friend to the day of his death.  Many a time, when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident.  It was from the little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. that I got my real introduction to business life—­if the vocation of a porter can be called “business.”

I became an under-porter in a wholesale house on Broadway at five dollars a week, and spent a winter at the job.  The head of the house was a leader of national reputation in his particular denomination.  I was sitting on the radiator one winter’s morning before the store was opened when the chief clerk came in.  It was a Monday morning, and his first words were: 

“Well, what did you do yesterday?”

“I taught a Bible Class, led a people’s meeting, and preached once,” was my reply.  He looked dumbfounded.