And with small wonder can I be so careless, for ever since I left Chicago work has ceased to be a difficult thing to find and has grown to be an increasingly difficult matter to avoid. It has come to be a positive embarrassment, for every day I am stopped by the way and urged to go to work, and it is not easy to refuse men who are most evidently short-handed. I shall set out in the morning with six dollars--five earned from Mr. Barton and one remaining from my last employment--and I shall try to cover a wide strip of country before settling down to another job; but, upon the basis of my past experience, I am sure that on an average of at least once a day in the coming march some farmer will ask me to help him at his work. All through Illinois and from Minneapolis to this point, which is near the Iowa border, this has been my uniform experience. It was late in the spring when I left Chicago. Almost continuous rains compelled me to defer my start from day to day until the month of May was far advanced, and then I stopped at Joliet and joined for a week a gang of laborers in the works of the Illinois Steel Company. So that it was the first of June before I found myself in the open country once more, after six months as a city workman. Even then the skies continued threatening, and frequent rains forced me from the soft loam of the country roads to a firmer footing on the line of the Rock Island Railway for most of the journey to the Mississippi. I was relatively flush with wages earned at Joliet, and so was under no necessity to stop. But the chance of work never failed me, for not only in the rich farming region about Morris but also in the brick-kilns in the neighborhood of Ottawa and Utica I found abundant offers of a job. From Davenport I went by rail to Minneapolis, for I had resolved to emerge for a week and attend the National Republican Convention in that city, and not days enough remained, when I reached the river, to admit of my walking there in time for the political gathering. But when the Convention closed I started again, penniless and afoot, on the long march which I have interrupted twice, once when working for a fine old Irish farmer near Belle Plain, and a second time when I accepted Mr. Barton’s offer.