After my three-cent supper, I hurried to a church where a prayer-meeting was in progress. After the meeting I made a confidant of the minister, who took me before a group of men; the total result of which was that they lent me ten dollars on a note which I later paid, or tried to pay, but they refused to accept the money and sent me back my note. A scalper’s ticket to New York City took nearly all of the ten dollars. I returned to the “hotel” where I sold my umbrella and out of the proceeds paid my room rent and bade good-bye to the men who lounged there. The New York train which I had to take did not leave Buffalo until two o’clock in the morning. As I went through the quiet streets, the scavengers were out, with bags on their shoulders, fingering the refuse barrels that lined the curbs in front of hotels and eating-houses. It was a glimpse of poverty that made me shudder, and which by comparison made me feel quite aristocratic. The conductor accepted my scalper’s ticket without comment, though he might have put me off the train on the least suspicion. I took off my heavy shoes, leaned back in the seat and fell asleep without a care to distract me while the express hummed smoothly through the night. As soon as the train arrived in the New York station I had to hurry across the city to the steamboat wharves in time to board the Providence steamer for the dollar ride into the Fall River zone. Though I had never been in the metropolis before, and though I stood for a thrilling moment in the very midst of its wonders, impelling poverty drove me across the city like a slave-master’s whip, and I boarded the steamer with merely an impressionistic glance of some ferry-houses, some wholesale fruit houses, a dilapidated horse-car, some street corner blockades, a whiff of Hester street, and the East River bridges. After a night in the forward part of the boat, sleeping in a berth which might have been the confines of a barrel, while a drunken man next to me kept up a periodic, loose-mouthed protest to a man in the upper berth that he wished he wouldn’t snore so loud and keep everybody awake, I was put ashore in Providence. From there I was taken by trolley into Massachusetts and home. When I arrived in New Bedford I had thirty-five cents remaining in my pocket. But I was home! And ready for the next step in my education, whatever that should be. _Chapter XX Aunt Millie’s Interpretation of Education. The Right Sort of an Adviser Gets Hold of me_ I hurried--with a feeling of pride--in the direction of the tenement where my aunt and uncle were living. It was nearly noon. I would surprise my aunt! I knocked on the door. My Aunt Millie stood before me. “Hello!” I cried. “How are you?” She gazed on me with evident surprise, and with a mixture of suspicion, which she put in her first words: “I thought you were out getting made into a gentleman--at one of those schools?” “Why, aunt, I’ve had two years of education--so far. I mean to have more.”