Then he says, like he was apologizing to someone about something: “Being interested in sociology and the lower classes in general, I sent for you to get some first-hand observations on your train of mind,” he says. Or it was words like them. “I'm a sociologist,” he says. I seen I made a hit before and I thinks I'll push my luck, so I swells up and says: “I'm a kind of sociologist myself.” “Hum,” he says, thoughtful-like. “Indeed? And your itinerant mode of subsistence is persecuted in pursuit of your desire to study knowledge of the human specimen and to observe wisdom as to the ways they live in the underworld,” he says. Or it was words to that effect. I wish I'd a-had him wrote them words down. Then I'd a-had 'em just right now. I seen a bunch of good words help a man out of a hole before this. Words has always been more or less my admiration; you can never tell what one of them long gazaboos is going to do till you spring it on somebody. So I says: “That's me, perfessor. I likes to float around and see what's doing.” Then he tells me that sociology was how the criminal classes and the lower classes in general was regarded by the scientific classes, only it's a difficult brand of science to get next to, he says, on account of the lower classes like me being mostly broke out with environment he says, unbeknownst even to theirselves. He's not what you would call a practicing sociologist all the time, being afraid, I suppose, he would catch it if he got too close to it; he's just one of the boys that writes about it, so as both the lower classes and the scientific classes won't make no bad breaks, he says. But what he wants of me just now ain't got nothing to do with that, he says. He's been making experiments with all kinds of canned victuals, that is put up with acid that eats holes in your stomach, he says, and so long as I'm going to be a guest he's going to mix some of them acids in my chuck and weigh me after each meal. He says I'll start slow and easy and there won't be nothing dangerous about it. He's been practicing on William Dear and Miss Estelle, which I suppose it was the acids got into her smile, but he's going to give them a rest, them being naturally delicate. I ain't got no kick, I thinks, and I'm going to leave this place in a day or two anyhow. Besides, I always was intrusted in scientific things and games of chance of all kinds. But I didn't leave in a few days, and the first thing I knew I'd been there a week. I had pretty much the run of the house, and I eat my meals with Biddy Malone, the only uncomfortable feature of being a guest being that Miss Estelle, soon as she found out I was an agnostic (whatever brand of science that is, which I never found out to this day, just having come across the word accidental), she begun to take charge of my religion and intellectuals and things like that. She used to try to cure the perfessor, too, but she had to give it up for a bad job, Biddy says.