His Scotch ancestry, a good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter. Aleck had been a bookkeeper; but he didn't get on well with his employers, lost his job, got to drinking, and went so far downhill that his wife had to take their two children and go home to her people several hundred miles away. Aleck finally drifted into a bureau for homeless men, where the agent became interested in him and worked with him for six months, getting him job after job, which he always lost through drink or temper. He seemed incapable of taking directions or working with other people. In all that time the agent felt that he was getting no nearer the root of Aleck's trouble, though he came back after each dismissal and doggedly took whatever was offered. Finally, the agent's patience wore thin, and when Aleck had been more than usually dour and aggravating it went entirely to pieces. Aleck listened to his outburst apparently unmoved; then said, "Very well, if you want to know what would make me stop drinking, I'll tell you. If I could see any ray of hope that I was on the way to getting my home and family back, I'd stop and stop quick." On the agent's desk there happened to be a letter from a friend who wanted a tenant farmer. He thrust it into Aleck's hand saying, "There's your chance if you mean what you say." The man's reply was to ask when he could get a train. At the end of several weeks Aleck wrote that he had not drunk a drop and was making good, which was enthusiastically confirmed by his employer. He begged the agent to intercede with his wife, and a letter went to her which brought the telegraphic reply, "Starting tomorrow." How they got through the first winter the agent never knew exactly. But they pulled through and the next year was easy, as country-born Aleck's skill came back. Six years later, during which time the agent heard from them once or twice a year, Aleck was still keeping straight, the children were doing well in school, and the family, prosperous and happy, had bought a farm of their own in another state. FOOTNOTES: [40] The deserter who does not fail to support is usually safe from punishment no matter how aggravated his offense. A man living with his wife and five-year-old boy in an eastern city eloped with another woman to a city in the Middle West. The couple kidnapped the boy and took him with them; and the distracted woman, bereft of both her husband and child, had no recourse in any court, since the father was continuing to provide for his son. [41] Proceedings of the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction, 1910, p. 76. [42] Loane, M.: The Queen's Poor, p. 102. London, Edward Arnold, 1905. [43] Solenberger, Alice Willard: One Thousand Homeless Men, p. 22. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1911.