“Say, bub, if you ever strike an old gazabo as soft as dat one, lemme know, will ye?” Prayer to him was “talking through one’s hat.”

In a few weeks he straightened up and began to give me very fine assistance in the bunk-house.  His change of mind and heart almost lost him his job, for he lost a good deal of his brutality—­the thing that fitted him for his work.  In ushering insubordinate gentlemen downstairs, he did it more with force of persuasion than with the force of his shoe.  He continued my campaign of cleaning, and decorated the kalsomined walls with chromos that he bought at one penny apiece.  He was a psychologist and would have probably been surprised if anybody had told him so.  He could tell at once the moral worth of a lodger; so he was a very good lieutenant and picked out the best of the men who had reached the bottom—­and the bunk-house was the bottom rung of the social ladder.  Every day he had his story to tell—­of the newcomers and their possibilities.  His conversion was a matter of slow work.  Indeed, I don’t know what conversion meant in his case.  It certainly was not the working out of any theological formula that I had preached to him.

The telling of this man’s story in churches helped the work a great deal.  It was the kind of thing that appealed to the churches—­rather graphic and striking; so, unconsciously we exploited him.  We could have gotten a hundred dollars to help a man like this—­whose life after all was past or nearly past—­to one dollar we could get for the work of saving a boy from such a life!

Among the most interesting characters that I came in contact with in those days was Dave Ranney; he is now himself a missionary to the Bowery lodging houses.  I was going across Chatham Square one night, when this man tapped me on the shoulder—­“touched me”—­he would call it.  He was “a puddler from Pittsburg,” so he said.

“Show me your hands,” I replied.  Instead, he stuck them deep into his trouser pockets, and I told him to try again.  He said he was hungry, so I took him to a restaurant, but he couldn’t eat.  He wanted a drink, but I wouldn’t give that to him.  He walked the streets that night, but he came to me later and I helped him; and every time he came, he got a little nearer the truth in telling his story.  Finally I got it all.  He squared himself and began the fight of his life.

Another convert of the bunk-house was Edward Dowling.  “Der’s an old gazabo here,” said the bouncer to me one day, “and he’s got de angel goods on him O.K.”  He was a quiet, reticent old man of sixty, an Irishman who had served in the British Army in India with Havelock and Colin Campbell.  He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other one.  He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend.  Seeing a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside him and watched the process.  In that way he learned something of the trade.