“But I’m gettin’ clear off’n my subject again, just as I always am. I was tellin’ you about that day. Well, after I gave the lady the half peck of potatoes I went on peddlin’, but didn’t seem to sell much. I ought to ‘ve got through by two or three o’clock. It was a long enough day for me, and the horse, too, but I had so many potatoes left that I couldn’t stop, so I kept on. I got down around Thirty-fifth Street and was pretty cold and went into a saloon where I saw one of the boys. One of ‘em was runnin’ for the legislature and he asked us all to take a drink, and of course we did; then he asked us to take another and we done that; and in a few minutes that feller that was runnin’ for the senate, he come in and he asked us all to take a drink and of course we done that, and he said a few words about the election and how he hoped we all would vote for him, and we told him we would, and that as near as we could find out all the boys was with him, that the other feller was a kind of stiff anyhow. He went out, and then, just as I was leavin’, the feller that was runnin’ against him, he come in and he set ‘em up a couple of times and said he hoped we was all with him, and of course we told him we was, and then he went away. Well, of course, I took whiskey every time because I was cold and that kind of warmed me up. Then I went out to the wagon again and drove on down Thirty-fifth Street to sell the rest of the potatoes. Finally the horse began to go lame, and seemed pretty tired, and I turned back toward the house, peddlin’ on the way. I guess I didn’t sell anything after I left Thirty-fifth Street, though I kept callin’ out until my voice got kind of husky and all stopped up. I guess it was the cold air that I wa’n’t used to yet. The snow was comin’ down pretty fast as I drove along and the wind was blowin’ quite a bit in my face and it was a bad night. It commenced gettin’ dark pretty soon after. You know the days are short along the last of November. “Then I kep’ thinkin’ about the cold weather. I always hated winter anyhow, and I hadn’t expected ‘twould turn cold quite so quick and of course I wa’n’t ready for it. I couldn’t seem to think of anything but the winter. I s’pose that was the reason I done the things I did afterward. I got to thinkin’ about the house and how many cracks there was in it and how much coal it took to heat it. Then I began to think about the price of coal and how it’s cheaper in the summer than in the winter, and how the price keeps goin’ up so much a month all the time until winter, so, of course, all the rich people can get their coal in the summer when it was cheap and leave the poor people to get it in the winter when it got high. Then I thought how everything seemed to be against the poor and how you couldn’t get on no matter what you done.