Where was your last? What did you get? How did you like your boss? Did you leave or was you fired? Are you a single fella or a married fella? Did you have long hours? Wouldn’t he give you your raise? Did he kick against the booze? These were mere starters of talk that invariably died like seedlings in a wrong climate. Getting used to my mates, I made them out to be a gardener, a chauffeur, a teamster, a decayed English butler, and a negro boy who called himself a waiter. Talking about their bosses, their tone on the whole was hostile without personal malevolence. That is to say, there was little or no enmity to individuals, though the tendency to curse the systems of civilized life was general. I think they would have agreed with my Cornish friend that "all employers is punk," and considered their feelings sufficiently expressed at that. But as I sat among them, day after day, I began, oddly enough, to orientate my vision to their point of view. They were, of course, not always the same men. The original five melted away into jobs within three or four days; but five or six or seven was about the daily average in our little pen. They came, were cowed, were selected, and went off. Twice during the first week I was called out in response to applicants for unusual grades of help, but my manner and speech seemed to overawe the ladies who wanted to hire, and I was remanded to my cell. "She said she didn’t want that _kind_ of a man." "He wouldn’t want to eat in the kitchen," were the explanations given me by Miss Bryne. In vain I protested that I would eat anywhere, so long as I ate. The other servants wouldn’t get used to me, and so no more was to be said. But I was getting used to the other servants. That is my point. Insensibly I was changing my whole social attitude. It was like the difference in looking at the Grand Cañon of Arizona—downward from El Tovar, or upward from the brink of the Colorado. Little by little I found myself staring upward from the bottom, through all sorts of ranks above me. I didn’t notice the change at once. For a time I thought I still retained my sense of obscured superiority. I arrived in the morning, heard from the lips of the birdlike young lady at the desk the familiar "Nothing yet," passed on to the pen, nodded to those who were assembled, some of whom I would have seen the day before, listened to their timid scraps of talk, which hardly ever varied from a few worn notes.