"It's rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night--also for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply of dinner. I don't mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but I'll have to pay her in a day or so now. I'm in poor spirits to-night, so can't write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It's funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A word to the wise, etc. "What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all! "How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for themselves a while. They haven't any trusts to monopolize the jobs as yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I'd like to see you all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don't remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to say financial. And see that the moss doesn't get too thickly overlaid on my memory." Marley's new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is, it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics, the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.