“Ain’t you found a job yet?” began the superintendent.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about your case,” he continued. “We ain’t got a job for you at the foundry,” he hastened to explain, “but I’ve heard from a friend of mine in Milwaukee, and they’re short of men in your line. Could you go up there?”
“Well, that ain’t necessary. I--I’m good for a ticket,” added the superintendent, with a look of embarrassment.
And he was as good as his word, for he went with Clark to the station, where he added to the ticket a dollar, both of which were accepted as a loan.
Clark was nearly mad with suppressed delight when he met me in the entrance of the post-office, where he had asked me to await his return. With his usual generosity he shared his good fortune with me, and, before we went to the railway station together we had a farewell dinner on beefsteak and onions and unlimited coffee and bread.
My own success followed Clark’s by only a few days, when I was taken on as a hand-truckman in a factory on the West Side; but there is one intervening experience which belongs distinctively to this part of the general experiment.
I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings; the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements” and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,” and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the uncongenial company which it is forced to keep.