The chairman of our trustees was a business man who was very much engrossed with the New Thought.  He saw a great future for me if I would get “in tune with the infinite.”  I was more than willing.  He expounded to me the wonders of the new regime.  Would I take lessons in healing?  Certainly!  He paid an American Yogi a hundred dollars to teach me.  I was unaware of the cost.  At first it was by correspondence.  His chirography looked like a plate of spaghetti.  I was instructed how to take a bath and when.  The second letter ordered me to sleep with my head to the East.  I was “a Capricorner, buoyant, lucky,” so he said.  At the end of a month I paid him a visit.  He showed me how to manipulate a patient—­absent or present—­and how to charge!

The correspondence was taken verbatim from a ten-cent book on astrology; I got tired, and handed the letters over to my wife.  She took them seriously, and when she had made what she thought was progress she inadvertently told the chairman of the trustees.  That settled him.  He resigned forthwith, and we saw him no more.

I thought we had reached the point where there was nothing further to lose; but I was mistaken.  I had been charged with being a Socialist, and, curious to know what a Socialist was, I began to study the subject.  What I feared came upon me:  I announced myself a Socialist.  That settled the Single Taxers; they left in a bunch!  No, hardly in a bunch; for two of them remained.

The Universalists invited us to use their church for our Sunday night meetings.  We thought that a fortunate windfall.  We were to pay five dollars a night.  We did so until one week we had nothing to eat and we let the rent wait.  The trustees of the Universalist Church met and passed a resolution something like this:  “Resolved, that in order that the good feeling existing between the People’s Church and the Universalist Church be maintained, that the People’s Church be requested to pay the rent after each service.”  We paid up and quit.

The most intelligent man in our church was a young draftsman in the Winchester Arms Company.  He was a man of boundless energy and great courage.  He lost his job.  No reason was given.  His wife, before her marriage, had been a trained nurse, and in her professional life had nursed the wife of a bank president, who was a director in the gun company.  One day these ladies met, and the lady of the bank said she would find out why the husband of her former nurse was discharged.  The director got at the facts, and gave them to his wife, sub rosa:  “He belongs to Irvine’s church—­and Irvine is an anarchist.”  The young man got another job in another city.  After a few discharges of that kind, men who did not want to leave the city got scared and gave me a wide berth.

I looked around for something to do to earn a living.  I found a young bookbinder in a commercial house, and as he was a master craftsman, I advised him to hang out a shingle and work for himself.  He did so.  When I was casting around for a new method of earning a living I thought of him, and asked him to take me as an apprentice.  He did so, and I put an apron on and began to work at his bench.  One day, when the reporters were hard up for news, one of them called for an interview.