I then left for the Labor Bureau of the Associated Charities. Perhaps I could get work with enough pay in advance for a breakfast. On reaching there I found twenty men and boys standing outside, and after waiting an hour there seemed to be very little work to be had. Only a few were supplied. During my stay in Cleveland, as a test, I went every day to this place but never succeeded in getting work. This was the only place I had been able to find in Cleveland which even offered work to a man without money. I then tried for an hour to do something for a meal, but was unsuccessful. Going back to the Square I sat down and considered my contract and my feelings. I had agreed with myself to do nothing that would make me lose my self-respect, yet I must eat or forfeit my contract. I glanced down at my hand. There was the golden circle of love,--my wedding ring. Other starving men had been forced to pawn this priceless emblem of sweet memories. I remembered a penniless man whom I met in San Francisco, weak from the suffering caused by extreme want. He was an engraver by trade. Hoping against fate that each day would bring him an opportunity, he walked and searched for the place which he knew he could so ably fill. As we talked he told me a story from the book of his life; of a girl wife and a baby boy whom the Angel had taken. While he talked he glanced down and turned upon his finger a slender thread of gold. I saw that to this man, there lay in that circle of love, a sacred memory,--the blossoming of an honest workingman's home, attributes of which were truth, love, honor and eternal fidelity. The workingman's home,--without the intrusion of poverty--is the stronghold of a great and good citizen, _the steadfast guiding star of a great government_. Speaking to me with that freedom born of the sympathy which binds one homeless man to another (and he was a man, ambitious, free from the bondage of any bad habit), he said, "I will have to pawn my ring to-day, but," with determined emphasis, "I will never lose it. Yet I am a little afraid of the pawnshop. Their rate of interest is theft, and the time for redemption limited to one month." We then talked of New York City's Provident Loan Association, which is simply the poor man's depository, the interest only one per cent, a month, and the time one year. The city that is without this social good is the city that does not belong to the present day progress, and must savor of betrayal, of artifice, of ill-gotten gains. As I left him, I said, "Should you have to pawn your ring, look the matter up. Of course, San Francisco must have so worthy an organization." Leaving the Square I found a pawnshop. Unlike the man in actual poverty, I had not the dread fear of losing the cherished momento. The pawnshop man scratched it, weighed it, raised his hand, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "I giff you vun dollar." "But it cost ten," I said. "Vell, all right, I giff you vun dollar."