THE great city had not been kind to them. For three weeks they had been beaten back and forth all the length and breadth of its hot and inhospitable streets until their little money and their courage were exhausted, and they had drifted back to the Battery, the place nearest home which they could reach “without money and without price.” They had come here for work and had sought it from shop to shop, wherever men with a fair share of muscle were wanted; but they always found that some stronger man had come before them so they were left, like the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda, unhealed at the edge of the water. They had been my travelling companions across the sea, and I felt some responsibility for them, besides being anxious to know what becomes of men in America who have neither our speech which might be silver, nor the silent gold which serves as power. So I cast my lot and my small change among them. We travelled as far as a five cent fare would take us and began looking for work among the large mansions and fancy farms which line the shore of Long Island Sound. Barking dogs, frightened house maids and discourteous lackeys we found everywhere, but neither work nor food for the four of us. We did not look like tramps, although our clothes were shabby and the dust and grime of the city did not tend to improve our appearance; yet we spent a whole day looking unsuccessfully for work, and when night came upon us nothing remained but to return to the city, as bankrupt in our stock of courage as in our finances. That blessed and famous bread line, where the Lord answers His poor people’s prayer for daily bread, kept us from starving, and there was enough free ice water to be had to wash down the bread and benumb our digestive organs into silence. Union and Madison square park benches were our beds a few minutes at a time, for the watchful policeman kept us moving as if we were drunk from laudanum. We went the length of lower Broadway, to City Hall park, and finally to the Battery where the next morning’s gray found us, wearier and shabbier than ever. Twenty-four such hours as we lived were enough to push us down the social scale to the level of the tramp, and we were greeted as such by those birds of passage, one of whom proved to be a “friend in need.” He really pitied my speechless companions and after sharing with us his begged buns, he told us of the New Jersey paradise where orchards and truck gardens were waiting for the toil of our hands.