My next job was as insurance solicitor (tout), but I could not make car-fare at it. Then I sold sewing machines, or rather tried to, but got tired of having the dog set on me. I then got a berth as city salesman for a wholesale grocery house, and did fairly well for a while; but the quality of the goods with which they filled the orders was so inferior to the samples that I could never get a second order in the same store. My next job was with a drug manufacturer as demonstrator—that is, I had a chair and a table, which I moved weekly from one large store to another in different parts of the city, and gave out samples (of root-beer and different essences) and advertising matter, and explained all about the merits of our particular goods, and tried to answer all the fool questions put to me. The reason of all this was that we sold our goods to those stores under a guarantee that we would advertise them till we had created a demand for them. After some weeks of this I was put out on the street as city salesman, and did well, making $15 per week and expenses. The head of the firm, a “Yankee” from Hartford, Conn., was one of the best men I ever worked for, and the kindest. The first week I handed him a detailed account of my expenses he told me, “I only want the total, not the items. A dishonest man cannot work for me, and an honest man I trust.” Then, when he had looked over it, he saw I had lunches down at 15 cents (7½d.), and he said, “My employees do not have to eat 15-cent lunches. Get yourself decent meals hereafter.” For men such as this it is a pleasure to work, and they lose nothing by their kindness. CHAPTER VII Life under Difficulties—drawbacks of a Public-school Training—Hints on Emigration—Pneumonia—Unemployment in Chicago, 1893. Do not imagine from what I have just written that I stepped from one of these positions into another. Far from it; there are successive gaps between filled with fruitless searching after work. In one thing I was very lucky: two of my wife’s brothers came to Chicago at the same time she and I did, and we all helped one another. When in need, one could always get meals from the others, if they had work; and for this reason none of us starved, though we ate slim meals occasionally. I remember, one evening, one of the boys came up to our room to go out and sup with us (we ate at a restaurant), whereas my wife and I had been waiting for him to come home, so that we could get him to take _us_ out! I had a little bank in which I had been putting pennies for a rainy day, and we decided to break it open, as the rainy day had arrived. It had, if I remember right, 78 cents in it; and there came the rub—none of us wanted to hand the waiter 78 copper cents for the supper, so it had to be changed into silver, and none of us wanted to do the changing. At last we put the job on my wife, as we were two to one against her.