All these are at work by eight o’clock, the wage-earners having been at it an hour already. Then come, mingling in the miscellaneous concourse of business streets which have taken on the full day’s complexity, the superintendents and managers, and the heads of business houses and of legal firms, and bankers, and brokers, and all the company of rare men, whose native gifts of creative power or organizing capacity or executive ability, joined to great energy and resolution, have placed them in command of their co-workers, and made them responsible, as only the few can be responsible, for the lives and well-being of their fellows. I recognize an eminent lawyer in the moving crowd, who, in democratic fashion, is walking to his office. He is a nobleman by every gift of nature, and his sensitive, expressive face, responsive to the grace of passing thought, is an unconscious appeal to my flagging courage, and to that, perhaps, of many another man in the pressing throng. I see in a jolting omnibus a noted merchant, his head bowed over a morning paper as he rides to his business house. He holds a foremost place in business, yet it is fully equalled by his standing as a Christian gentleman and as a wise and most efficient philanthropist. Almost touching elbows we pass each other on the street, a fellow-alumnus of my college and I, he an inheritor of great wealth and of a vast enterprise far-reaching in its scope to distant portions of the earth. And yet, so unmarred has he remained under the lavish gifts of fortune that his is already the dominant genius in the administration of immense productive power, and his influence is increasingly felt as a helpful and guiding force in great educational institutions of the land. But this resurgence of the city’s life, while it quickens the pulses for the time, is not an inspiration to last one through a day of disappointing search. By noon I had been turned many times away, and a sharp refusal to a polite request to be given a chance to work cuts deeper than men know who have never felt its wound. You try to ignore it at the first, and you bring greater energy to bear upon the hunt, but your wounds are there; and, in each succeeding advance, it is a sterner self-compulsion that forces you to lay bare again the shrinking quick of your quivering sensibilities. How often have I loitered about a door, passing and repassing it again and yet again before I could summon courage for the ordeal of a simple request for work! Early in my experience I learned never to ask after a possible vacancy. Employers have no vacancies to be filled by such an inquirer. I simply said that I was looking for a job, and should be glad of any work that I could do; and that, if I could be given a chance to work, I would do my best to earn a place.