"I know whereof I speak," he answered, "for I have a girl friend whom I have been helping for over a year. Just recently she confessed to me why she forgot the teachings of her childhood and mother, why she forgot her dream of being honorably married and becoming all that her mother was. She said, it was because she was hungry and had no place to sleep. She could not ask for charity or beg. 'I didn't know where or how to beg,' she said, 'but then I met you and you were kind to me.' I did not know this when I met that girl. I thought she was what she was from choice and not from necessity." As he got up to leave he said, "I am going to marry her and she shall be all that God intended her to be. I am going to help her, but there are many, very many girls who come to Portland, and who, through lack of life's necessities, are forced to forget." And this instance could be multiplied a thousand times, and in a thousand ways, in a thousand cities. In the afternoon, I began to look for work. I found that no privileges existed for labor; that the destitute working man, the man who was "broke," was forced to seek shelter where the homeless dog and rat seeks shelter. Men here, as in other cities, were forced to the fermenting refuse thrown from stables because it held warmth! Often men slept out in the open air behind billboards and in a hundred other deplorable places, where they could get a little rest unless discovered by the police and thrown into jail. In my search for work, I went to the offices of the Portland Light, Power and Electric Railway Company. I asked the clerk what show there was to get work as motorman or conductor. He answered, "pretty slim." Nevertheless, he asked how old I was. When I told him, he said there was no work for me, that there was a brotherhood of the railway employees which was an adjunct to the company and one of its rules was not to hire a man over forty. I said, "It is true, I am fifty, but I am just as strong and well, able-bodied and competent as I was at twenty-five." But that made no difference. I then asked, "If I were of an eligible age and you should give me work, what do you pay?" He said, "You are expected to work the first ten days for nothing. Then you receive twenty-four cents an hour for five years, then thirty cents as long as you live and work." I said, "I am broke, and even though I were of an age to be chosen, I would be giving my time to you during those ten days, and a man will starve to death in nine." A man who looks for work does not lose his worthiness, but the man who is forced to ask alms, to ask something for nothing, does.