He was a little heated, but he caught himself with a laugh and was smiling genially as he added: “I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often. Scarcely a day passes that men don’t come in here asking for a job. My experience is that if they were half as much in earnest in looking for work as I am in looking for men that can work, they wouldn’t search far or long. I’ve tried a good many of them in my time. I can tell now in five minutes whether a man has any real work in him; and those that are worth their keep when you haven’t your eye on them, are as scarce as hens’ teeth. There are good jobs looking for all the men that are good enough for them; if you want to prove it, start right in here, or go into the State and ask the farmers for a chance to work.” I did not say that this last was the very thing I meant to do. Instead, I began to tell him of the cases that I knew of men, who, through no fault of their own, were out of work and were not free to go where it could be easily found. Mr. Ross was sympathetic with what was real and personal in the sufferings of unfortunate workers; and gathering encouragement, I went on to speak of suffering no less real which was the result of sheer incapacity, a native weakness of will or lack of courage or perseverance. This made him smile again, and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked me whether I did not think it was expecting a good deal of organized society to provide for the unfit. Then drawing out his watch, he glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine disregard of the outer man, he asked me to go home with him to supper. I should have been delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I had not forgotten, however, a too hospitable minister in Connecticut; but at the next moment I accepted gladly Mr. Ross’s invitation to drive with him in the evening. Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced with delight of motion, we set out an hour or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove first through business streets, pointing out to me the principal buildings as we passed, then up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which the city stands, through an attractive residence quarter. From there we could look down upon the river flowing between banks of wooded hills, with its swollen, muddy waters made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the lower city we went and out over the bridge to the military post of Rock Island, past the arsenal and the barracks to the officers’ quarters among splendid trees and broad reaches of shaded lawn, and finally to an old farm-house, which had been the home of Colonel Davenport at the time of his struggles with the Indians. It was not a distant date in actual years, but the contrast with the present sway of modern civilization seemed to link it with a far antiquity. The streets were ablaze with electrics as we drove through the cities of Rock Island and Moline, where the pavements were thronged by slowly moving crowds.