It is wonderful what an influence one’s surroundings will have upon their character. Here I had been in Ardmore, only thirty minutes and I caught myself approaching that office in the same servile manner affected by all whom I saw enter there. I stood for some minutes hesitating before the portals where sat enthroned those who held my destiny in their hands. Cold and hunger are grim and determined drivers, however, and both were flaying me with their whips. Summoning my manhood I entered, approached the employment window and begged the right to earn my bread. The clerk gave me one keen look that swept me from head to foot and tersely assigned me to servitude in Mine 33, the one I had passed in the morning. He handed me an order on the store that entitled me to a miner’s outfit to be paid for out of the first money earned. He also assigned me a number by which I was henceforth to be designated in all my dealings with the Company. I became Number 337, and if I differed in any particular from the man bearing that same number in the Jefferson City penitentiary I was unable to detect that difference. True, I was permitted to walk the streets unmolested, but the product of my toil belonged to the Kansas and Texas Coal Company. I felt relieved. I had passed from the ranks of the unemployed. Henceforth I was to be a sovereign American citizen enjoying, as such, the Constitutional right to earn my bread. I passed into the store and purchased such things as appeared needful, using one of the miners as a model from which to deduce my needs. A coarse pair of heavy shoes, ducking overalls and shirt, a pit cap with place in front to carry the lamp, the lamp itself, a gallon of lard oil for the same, a dinner-pail called a “deck” and the necessary picks and shovel about completed the outfit. One of the clerks rather grudgingly answered my question regarding a boarding-place by informing me that there was a house on the hill that made a practice of feeding miners. Carrying my bundle, I called at the designated house and secured board and lodging. The house was slightly better than those I had passed before and, standing upon higher ground, was rather less filthy. I soon found that the miner is expected to do without all the luxuries and generally all the necessities of life. Water seemed the only article that could be obtained in plenty and for that I soon had reason to be truly grateful. The table fare was of the coarsest and cheapest variety possible. It possessed the sole merit of sustaining life, and that to me at the time overbalanced all other considerations. The beds were arranged in rows in an upper room. Two people were expected to occupy one bed. I had assigned to be my bed-fellow a young Cornishman, and I suspect the landlady selected him for that position owing to the fact that he was slightly less dirty than her other boarders.