An hour later I was at the Asylum on the errand of getting my pay. I had anticipated the appointed time by a few minutes, and was the first of the workmen in the office. The clerk was in his place, however; and my appearance, hat in hand, furnished him with the signal for drawing from his desk the receipt-forms, upon which the men acknowledge the payments by their signatures. In the bustle of the business just beginning, the clerk turned upon me and asked, somewhat brusquely, if I could write my name, or whether he should write it for me, and I affix my mark. So unexpected was the question, that I was conscious at first of some bewilderment, and then of a rising resentment against the fact that such a question should be put to an American workman. I said that I had acquired the habit of signing my own name when necessary; but I might have spared myself that folly, for the clerk hastened to explain with the kindest consideration that, of all the laborers whom he habitually pays off, scarcely half can write; "although," he added, with an admirable touch of fairness, "a very small proportion of the illiterate are native-born Americans." I am afraid that my resentment had its source in a grotesquely foolish feeling. I have been mistaken for a drunkard, and a detective, and a disreputable double of myself, and have been made a bogey of to frighten children into obedience withal, but not once, so far as I know, have I been taken for a gentleman. And if the truth must be told, I fear that the very success of my disguise is somewhat chagrinning at times. There was no wrench on the next morning in parting with the family with whom I boarded, unless my landlady shared my regret at leaving. She was a meek little woman who slaved heroically at household work to support her daughter, who studied stenography and typewriting, and her idle husband, who led the life of a professional invalid. He had tried upon me highly colored tales of his career as a soldier, and of what he would have done in life but for his ill-health, tales which I soon learned to interrupt with small services to his wife, and he gave me up as hopelessly unsympathetic. A baseball game on the Asylum grounds attracted a large crowd one afternoon; and as Hunt and I drove past on an errand, I caught sight of the ex-soldier, who, at his home, was too great a sufferer to contribute even a helping hand at the housework toward his own support, but who here was dancing in vigor of delight over a two-base hit. It was clear that a rate of progress which had carried me not even so far as the border line of Pennsylvania, during nearly two months, would require a considerable portion of a lifetime in which to accomplish the three thousand miles before me. I resolved upon more energetic tramping as a wiser policy for, at least, the immediate future.