Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the summers. His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition. A post as a salesman or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a starting-point to a business career. He had counted upon a long, hard search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which, when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening, amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street. He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house opposite. The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks. In addition to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for food and an occasional dime in car-fare. All this was luxury. His last lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side. The room contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a soap-box on end which would hold a lamp. He was obliged to wash himself at the sink in the public passage. There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought. All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in for any honest living to which his hands could help him. It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work. A photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice. He paid the fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple, purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.