It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry. The question of earning a meal was no longer an interesting speculation, but a pressing necessity. I turned all my attention to that. A large iron gateway leading into a cemetery attracted me. Several ragged, tow-headed children were playing about the lodge. One of them told me that his father was inside, and he indicated the general direction of the tomb-stones. I found the digger sweating freely in a half-finished grave, and instantly offered my help as a means of earning a dinner. The grave-digger was an Irishman. He leaned at ease upon his spade, and soberly looked me over, and then declined my offer. He was polite, but not at all communicative, and he met my advances with the one remark that his "old woman" was not at home. A little farther on, I saw three women in pursuit of a hen. I eagerly volunteered my help, and asked for a dinner in payment. They quit the chase, and stood confronting me with serious faces, while I eloquently pleaded my readiness to help them. Nothing in the situation seemed to strike them as strange or irregular, but they touched upon it with short, grave speech, until I had the feeling of something momentous, and I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief. At last, in the outskirts of the village of Westport, I found a man mowing his lawn, and he was willing to give me a dinner for completing the work. My final success in getting an odd job was a splendid stimulus. I urged the mower over the lawn with a vigor that surprised me, and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of an immaculate kitchen was a liberal return for the labor. All that long summer afternoon I went from house to house, asking subscriptions for the magazine. The rack would have been easier upon my feelings, but I was eager to discover some ready way of approaching people. Not even the loafers at the station were in the least inclined to share their company with me. At nightfall I earned, by sawing wood for an hour, a supper and the right to sleep in an unused barn. When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked with bewilderment at the dull gray light that shone between the parted boards and through the rifts among the shingles. I came to myself with homesickness in full possession of me, and my back aching from the pressure of that intolerable pack. At the pump in the barn-yard I washed myself, and sat down to eat a slice of cold meat and some pieces of bread which I had saved from supper. An unfriendly collie watched me, and growled threateningly until I won him over with a share of the breakfast.