“Well, I can’t tell you all about my peddlin’, it ain’t worth while, and I must go on and tell you about how it happened. It was on the 26th day of November. You remember the day. There’s been a lot said about it in the newspapers. It was just three days before Thanksgivin’. I remember I was thinkin’ of Thanksgivin’, for we’d been livin’ pretty poorly, not very much but potatoes, for it was a rather hard fall on all us poor folks. I always hated to take the money for the things I sold but I couldn’t help it. You know I couldn’t give things away as if I was Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. Well, I knew we was goin’ to get a turkey from the alderman Thanksgivin’, just two days later, and I should have thought that would have cheered me up, but it didn’t. That mornin’ it was pretty cold when I got up. It was the first snow of the season, one of them blindin’, freezin’ days that we get in November, and then, of course, I wa’n’t used to the cold weather and wa’n’t dressed for it either. I didn’t have much breakfast for we didn’t have much stuff in the house. She got up and fried some potatoes and a little pork and that was about all, and then I hitched up the old horse and drove away. No one else was on the street. There wa’n’t generally, when I started after my loads in the mornin’. The old horse didn’t like to go either; he kind of pulled back on the hitch strap when I led him out of the barn, the way you sometimes see horses do when they hate to go anywhere or leave the barn. I s’pose horses is just like us about bein’ lazy and sick, and havin’ their mean days, only they can’t do anything about it. Well, I went down and got my load. In the first place I had some trouble with the Dago where I got the potatoes; they were pretty good ones but had been nipped a little by the frost in the car, and he couldn’t have sold ‘em to the stores, at least to any of the stores on the north side or the south side. They was just such potatoes as had to go to us poor folks and most likely to peddlers, and he wanted to charge me just about as much as if they was all right. I told him that I’d some trouble in sellin’ ‘em and I ought to make somethin’ off’n ‘em. He said I’d get just as much as I could for any kind, and I told him that I might possibly, but if I was goin’ to pay full price I wanted my customers to have just as good potatoes as anyone got, and besides I might lose some of my customers by sellin’ them that kind of potatoes. Then he dunned me for what I owed him and threatened not to trust me any more and by the time I left with my load I was worried and out of sorts, and made a poor start for the day.