Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.

If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world.

From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.

My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola harbour for a dollar and six “bits” a day.  There I got material for several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods.

While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city jail and asked permission to address the prisoners.  The jailer, of course, wanted to know what an unkempt labourer had to say to his charges.

In order to convince him I had to deliver an exegesis before the desk!  The cells were iron cages with stone floors.

A young Englishman, who had just landed after a long sea voyage the night before, was the first man to whom I talked.  He claimed to have been drugged and robbed in a saloon.  The fact of his incarceration was a small thing to him; what made him swear was the condition of his cage.  The excrements of probably half a dozen of his predecessors in the cell lay around him, nauseating and suffocating him.  Fire shot from his eyes as he pointed to it.  He was bitter, sarcastic, sneering, and with evident and abundant cause.

Whatever I had to say to the men and women in that dungeon that morning was driven from my mind and my lips.

The young man pushed all the resentment of his soul over into mine!  I spent that Sunday in working out a plan by which I could help Pensacola to clean up this social ulcer.

There was a Tourist Club there and I offered to lecture for them.  It was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon.  I called on the mayor and he promised to preside.  I interviewed several aldermen and they promised to attend.  I lectured for forty minutes on my experiences as a labourer in the camps of the South, and for ten minutes at the close described what I had seen in the city jail.

It was a somewhat heroic method of treatment, and I did not remain long enough to see the effect, but I at least deprived them of the plea of ignorance.

I found in Florida two Government officials who had done splendid work in behalf of labour.  I mean the labourers who were decoyed by false promises and brutally abused on their arrival in the camps.  They were both modest men—­men unlikely to enter politics for personal advancement.  I cut my articles out of the magazine and sent them to President Roosevelt, calling his attention to the conditions and commending these men to his notice.  The result was that they were both promoted to positions where their usefulness was increased and the cause of labour considerably helped.