"Well," said the man, seating himself in the door of the car, "I started out to get work--had my card from the Union and felt sure of success. I had only been married a year, but of course I had to leave my wife in Buffalo until I got located. When I applied for work I was asked for references and I had none. I told them where I had worked; they asked me to call later, and I called, only to learn that they didn't need any more men. This performance was repeated in every town I struck, until I began to believe that I had been blacklisted. In time my money gave out. I wrote to my wife and she sent me money. When that was gone I sent for more, not stopping to think that she had to eat, too, and that I had given her but ten dollars when I left home; but she sent me money. "Then there came a time when she could not send me anything; I could not keep up my dues in the Union, so was expelled. After that I found it hard to get passes. Lots of times I had to steal them, and finally--for the first time in my life--I stole something to eat. Say, pardner, did you ever get so hungry that the hunger cramped you like cholera morbus?" "No." "Then I reckon you've never stole, or what's worse, scabbed?" "No." "Well--I've done both, though this is the first time I've scabbed. As I was sayin' I got down so low that I had to steal, and then I thought of my wife, of how terrible it would be if she should have to steal, or maybe worse, and the thought of it drove me almost crazy. She was a pretty girl when I married her, an orphan only eighteen and I was twenty-eight. I determined to go home at once, but before I could get out of town I was arrested as a vag and sent up for sixty days. I thought at that time that my punishment was great,--that the mental and physical suffering that I endured in the workhouse was all that I could stand,--but I've seen it beaten since. At last they told me that I could go, but that I would be expected to shake the city of Chicago before the sun rose on the following day, and I did. I hung myself up on the trucks of a Pullman on the Lake Shore Limited and landed in Buffalo just before dawn. As I hurried along the old familiar streets I noticed a crowd of people standing by a narrow canal and stopped to see what the excitement was. I saw them fish the limp and lifeless form of a woman out of the muddy water and when the moonlight fell upon her face it startled me, for it was so like her face. A moment later I got near enough to see that the victim was a blonde, and my wife was brunette. Presently I came to the house where we had lived, but it was closed and dark. I aroused a number of the neighbors, but none of them knew where the little woman had gone.