It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1892, that I reached Davenport. I had followed the line of the Rock Island Railway from Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one night, at Bureau Junction, in a shed by the village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I hoped to work the passage as a hand on a river boat. At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped to ask the way to the office of the steamboat line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man who sat just inside. With a kindly face of German type, he was of middle age, a little stout, dressed in what is known as a “business suit,” and when he spoke, it was with a trace of German accent. Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to his name. He was not an Iowa farmer, but he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he had things to say about the unemployed. A director in a bank and the owner of a livery-stable, he was owner of I know not what besides, but I know that he was delightfully cordial, and that his hospitality was of a kind to do credit to the best traditions of the West. He answered my question obligingly, then asked me whether I was looking for a job. “For if you are,” he added, “there’s one right here,” and he waved his hand expressively in the direction of the stalls at the rear. This was more than I had bargained for; it was wholly new to my experience to find work in a town before I even asked for it. I told him frankly that I was out of employment and that I must find some soon, but that there were reasons, at the moment, why I wished to reach Minneapolis as early as possible. Being without the smallest gift of mimicry I could not disguise my tongue, and it had been a satisfaction from the first to find that this lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted readily enough as a working-man by my fellows, and my greenness and manner of speech, I had every reason to think, were credited to my being an immigrant of a new and hitherto unknown sort. “What’s your trade?” the men with whom I worked would generally ask me, supposing that clumsiness as a day laborer was accounted for by my having been trained to the manual skill of a handicraft. “What country are you from?” they inquired, and when I said “Black Rock,” which is the point in Connecticut from which I set out, I have no doubt that there came to their minds visions of an island in distant seas, where any manner of strange artisan might be bred. What they thought was of little consequence; that they were willing to receive me with naturalness to their companionship as a fellow-workman was of first importance to me, and this was an experience that never failed. At last I was west of the Mississippi, and, that I might pass as a man of education in the dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note, since men of education in the ranks of workmen have not been uncommon there.