It was the middle of an intensely hot afternoon. I was too tired to begin an immediate search for work, and so I took a seat on a bench in the shade of the public square, near to a fountain which played with a delicious sound of coolness under the trees. The park walks converged toward the fountain as a centre, and thither came the people who wished to rest in the shade or whose errands carried them through the public square. Presently a sharer of my bench got up and walked on, leaving behind him a copy of a local paper, which I eagerly seized upon and read and re-read until I became conscious of the dimming light of early evening. I was stiff and sore with the long, hot, dusty march, and uncomfortable at failing to get the letters upon which I had long counted, and I lacked utterly the energy to surmount even so slight a difficulty. But with the cool of the early evening came the natural hunger bred of a day’s march, and the necessity of providing for that and a shelter for the night. One of the streets of the city through which I had walked to the central square was named Fifth Avenue, and from one point on its pavement I could see through the open windows of a cheap hotel the tables in the dining-room spread for supper. There were screens at the windows and light cotton curtains, and the table-linen appeared clean and the shaded depth of the room looked to me, from the blistering pavement, like the subdued, fragrant coolness of real luxury. I retraced my steps to the hotel and asked for work, but there was none for me. I found the way to the stables and applied there, but an old man with a long nose and a white, patriarchal beard told me that they were in no need of more men. This was very different from my experience in the country, where everyone was in need of men and one had not to ask for employment but was everywhere urged to accept it, and I began to wonder whether for the sake of work I should be forced out again to the farms. Near this “Fifth Avenue” hotel I had noticed a livery-stable which fronted on one street and extended through to another bordering the public square. I went there next, and found its keeper seated comfortably in the wide, open doorway. Taciturn and non-committal at first, he confessed eventually to his needing a man in addition to the two already at work in the stable, and, after some questioning, he told me to come back at nine o’clock that evening and receive his decision.