There is sudden, nervous movement near me. Looking up I see a man seated straight, tugging frantically at his shirt, and swearing viciously the while in muffled tones. In a moment he has torn the garment off, and his crooked, bony fingers are passing swiftly over the shrivelled skin of his old, lean body in search of his tormentors, and his oaths come lisping from his toothless mouth. The men about him are ordering him, with deepening curses, to lie down and keep still. The former quiet soon returns, and in it I lie thinking of another world I know, a world of men and women whose plane of life is removed from this by all the distance of the infinite. Faith and love and high resolve are there, the inspirers of true living, and courage spurs to unflinching effort, and hope lights the way of unsuccess and gives vision through the vale of sorrow and of death. And the common intercourse is the perfect freedom which is bred of high allegiance to inborn courtesy and honor. What living link is there that joins these worlds together, and gives vital meaning to the confirmation of brotherhood spoken in the divine words of the Apostle: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another?” Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the army of the unemployed. CHAPTER II LIVING BY ODD JOBS No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO, Saturday, December 19, 1891. When life is lived in its simplest terms, one is brought to marvellous intimacy with vital processes. And through this intimacy no disclosure is more wonderful than that of nature’s quick response. Exhausted by hard labor, until your muscles quiver in impotent loss of energy, you sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to the play of a physical revival wherein you are renewed by the mystery of intussusception, and your responsive mood quickens to the tension of the involution whence life’s energies flow new and fresh again. Another hour may bring as great a change, and the full tide of your rising spirits may set swiftly back. It is as though you were a little child once more, and your moods obedient to little things.