While I was telling my story to the force, a reporter for the leading paper of the city came in, and that paper the next morning carried a story which stirred the town. As a result Spokane is going to have its Free Municipal Emergency Home. It is true that I found a desperate condition of things in Spokane for the man without the dime. But Spokane is no longer a country town, hid in the pine woods of Washington. She is a city--a city of stupendous natural resources, a city of a great awakening. She has begun a wonderful physical adornment and is combining with it those benevolent adornments to conserve her citizens. Spokane believes in the abolition of all influences that destroy. She is a force in the world to-day.
"_I never wear hand-made laces because they remind me of the eyes made blind in the weaving._"--MARIE CORELLI.
The morning of April 19, 1910, found me in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, resting on the green moss below the "laughing waters" of Minnehaha Falls. This wonderful spot of nature took possession of my imagination until I was in one of God's factories, where a thousand creations were coming into life and beauty. The sparkling translucent falls, touched with a silver light, became a marvelous lace-weaving loom. I caught, white and shining, the actual resemblance to the hand-made Irish, the Duchess and Rose-point. Over all this great workshop of the Diety was joy, peace and happiness. For the first time real lace to me was beautiful, for it was of God's creation. The vision of eyes made sightless, the stooped shoulders of the aged, the little, starving children overworked for the mere pittance to exist, these were not in the weaving. To the thoughtful, any adornment, the price of which is paid by the blood of human lives, is no longer beautiful. Here I saw that every bird and bee, all insect life, even the smallest and most abject about me, either were building or had built homes.
I then remembered my mission to Minneapolis. "Surely," I said to myself, "with this temple of worship to which the good folks of Minneapolis may come, thoughtlessness and selfishness will not be found here."
Yet I wondered if I should find it. I had come to continue my battle for my homeless brothers. The approach of late afternoon and night found me wandering about the streets a jobless, moneyless man looking for work and shelter. I found Minneapolis not in advance of other cities, and much behind many in its care for its homeless toilers.