I was supperless and without the means of securing anything to eat, and there remained an hour and a half before nine o’clock. In this predicament I had the good fortune to chance upon a delightful public library on the second floor of a building overlooking the square. It was like the library at Wilkesbarre in its charming accessibility; and, without a trace of the feeling of weariness or hunger left, I was reading ravenously, when, by some happy chance, I caught sight of a clock that was almost on the stroke of nine. With thanks, which were exceedingly short and abrupt, I returned the books to an attendant in the library and then bolted for Mr. Holden’s livery-stable. He was standing in the door when I came up, and, without preliminary remarks, “I will take you on,” he said, and then he added, almost without a pause, “I will give you twenty dollars a month and arrange for your board at the hotel [indicating the “Fifth Avenue” one], or thirty dollars a month and you manage for your own keep. You will sleep in the loft over the harness-room.” Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted the first offer, and wishing us good-night Mr. Holden left the stable in charge of Ed, one of the other hired men, and me. It was too late to get anything to eat at the hotel, and so I sat up with Ed and helped unhitch the horses and put up the traps as they came in. The last horse was housed by eleven o’clock. I then found that with the aid of a hose a capital bath was possible in the carriage-washing section of the stable, and then I went to bed on a cot in the well-ventilated loft, very content in the knowledge that I had found a good place and should have a breakfast in the morning. Ed called me at five o’clock as he was going below, and when I followed him he assigned me the two rows of stalls next to his own, which contained twelve horses and which were to be my first care. All these stalls had to be cleaned and the horses fed before I was at liberty to go to breakfast, and it was with a royal appetite that about seven o’clock I applied at the hotel. It was a very decent hostelry, largely made use of by farmers apparently. I was at once accepted as an employé of Mr. Holden, and served to an excellent meal by a trim little waitress, at one of the very tables which I had looked in upon on the previous afternoon with such genuine longing, and with the feeling of its belonging to a degree of luxury far beyond my reach. The twelve horses which had fallen to my share had all to be curried after breakfast and got ready for the day’s orders. Calls for vehicles began to arrive in the middle of the morning, and they continued to come at intervals throughout the day, so that there was much hitching and unhitching to interfere with regular tasks.