Life in the Pie Boarding-House was a never-ending delight. You never knew when you sat down at the table what kind of pie would be dealt you. Some of the fellows had been there half a year and swore that they had seen fifty-seven varieties and were expecting new ones at any meal. The crowd here was a selected crowd. It was made up of the pie connoisseurs of mill-town. Word was quietly passed out among the wisest fellows to move to this boarding-house and get a liberal education in pie. So it was a selected and well-behaved crowd. They didn't want to start any rumpus and thus lose their places at this attractive table. And that is one way that virtue is its own reward. Only the well-behaved fellows were tipped off to the pie bonanza. From this I learned that the better manners you have, the better fare you will get in this world. I had steadily risen from the “Bucket of Blood,” through the “Greasy Spoon” to a seat at the cherished “Pie” table. Here the cups were so thin that you couldn't break a man's head with them. I was steadily rising in the social world. CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage. It was a case of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us “into slavery,” for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more about slavery than we did before. And we knew that work in the rolling mills, bad as it was, was better than forced labor without pay. To-day when I hear orators rolling out the word “slavery” in connection with American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans molasses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree and the bloodhounds, he is not a genuine Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. You can't fool me. I know what real slavery is. I know as much about slavery as the man that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I worked under Simon Legree in Louisiana. On the way to New Orleans we paused at a siding, and a native asked me, “Who are all them men, and which way are they goin'?” I told him “which way” we were going, and that we were needing jobs. He replied: