Later he went to Meriden, Connecticut, where he worked almost beyond his strength in the stone pits. His friends kept urging him to go back to his trade as a pastry cook, insisting that the unskilled worker was the lowest animal in the social system. After two years Vanzetti returned to New York and took a job as assistant pastry chef in the Savarin Restaurant on Broadway. Eight months later he was unexpectedly discharged. He found a new job in a Seventh Avenue hotel, only to be discharged again after five months. Finally he learned the reason. The employment agencies were splitting their fees with the chefs, who found hiring and firing more profitable than keeping regular help. Again he was out of work, walking the streets, unable to find a job even as a dishwasher, buffeted by the weather, sometimes sleeping in doorways, his clothes lined with newspapers to keep out the cold. After five months he learned of an employment agency that was looking for pick-and-shovel workers. _It was necessary [he recalled] to present one’s self with unbuttoned shirts, because they wanted to see what one was like, they wanted to see the hair on the chest of the worker, and good for me that I am Latin with haired chest. They used to say: “You are too small—you are too old.”_ He was sent to a barrack settlement near Springfield, Massachusetts, and put to work on the railroad. After he had swung a pick several months and saved enough to pay off his debts in New York—a little over a hundred dollars—he moved on to Worcester, first working on the Boston & Albany Railroad, then in various factories. In 1914 he arrived in Plymouth where he was employed as a gardener, then with a loading gang in the Plymouth Cordage Company. Through all his working years he spent his scant free hours in reading. “Ah, how many nights I sat over some volume by a flickering gas jet,” he wrote, “far into the morning hours! Barely had I laid my head on my pillow when the whistle sounded and back I went to the factory or stone pits.” His reading was now mostly political: Gorki and Merlino, Reclus, Marx, Leon de Labriola, the _Testament_ of Carlo Pisacani, Mazzini’s _Duties of Man_. He boarded at first with Vincenzo Brini and his wife Alfonsina in Suosso’s Lane, one of the unpaved unnumbered streets, like Cherry Street and Cordage Lane, of North Plymouth’s Little Italy. The houses were either the barracklike structures of the Cordage Company or else square boxes with haphazard additions, always with a grape arbor in the rear. They clustered round the Cordage plant like houses round a medieval cathedral.