Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of being recruits in the army of the unemployed. We soon acquired the feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long habit. It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is. We fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed to imply a long antecedent wont. This was after Clark had despaired of work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a crossing for a living, if only he could get the job. One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive institutions. Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency, and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men. This happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want of workers. Clark and I soon made a considerable round. One morning we were at the gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then at various factory gates on the West Side. We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December, in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four miles or more from the heart of the city. It was no great hardship to set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference to sleeping in the station-house. Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest. We did not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm. The buildings shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which rose from the surface of the frozen streets. There was exhilaration in the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.