could not both be carried on at the same time, and I resolved to give up the cigar making.  This resolution led me into a life which held me bound more than a year.  During that period my regular time for going to bed was somewhere between four and six o’clock in the mornings.  I got up late in the afternoons, walked about a little, then went to the gambling house or the “Club.”  My New York was limited to ten blocks; the boundaries were Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third to Thirty-third Streets, with the cross streets one block to the west.  Central Park was a distant forest, and the lower part of the city a foreign land.  I look back upon the life I then led with a shudder when I think what would have been had I not escaped it.  But had I not escaped it, I should have been no more unfortunate than are many young colored men who come to New York.  During that dark period I became acquainted with a score of bright, intelligent young fellows who had come up to the great city with high hopes and ambitions and who had fallen under the spell of this under life, a spell they could not throw off.  There was one popularly known as “the doctor”; he had had two years in the Harvard Medical School, but here he was, living this gas-light life, his will and moral sense so enervated and deadened that it was impossible for him to break away.  I do not doubt that the same thing is going on now, but I have sympathy rather than censure for these victims, for I know how easy it is to slip into a slough from which it takes a herculean effort to leap.

I regret that I cannot contrast my views of life among colored people of New York; but the truth is, during my entire stay in this city I did not become acquainted with a single respectable family.  I knew that there were several colored men worth a hundred or so thousand dollars each, and some families who proudly dated their free ancestry back a half-dozen generations.  I also learned that in Brooklyn there lived quite a large colony in comfortable homes which they owned; but at no point did my life come in contact with theirs.

In my gambling experiences I passed through all the states and conditions that a gambler is heir to.  Some days found me able to peel ten and twenty-dollar bills from a roll, and others found me clad in a linen duster and carpet slippers.  I finally caught up another method of earning money, and so did not have to depend entirely upon the caprices of fortune at the gaming table.  Through continually listening to the music at the “Club,” and through my own previous training, my natural talent and perseverance, I developed into a remarkable player of ragtime; indeed, I had the name at that time of being the best ragtime-player in New York.  I brought all my knowledge of classic music to bear and, in so doing, achieved some novelties which pleased and even astonished my listeners.  It was I who first made ragtime transcriptions of familiar classic selections.  I used to play Mendelssohn’s