It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery, disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them, I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were lazy and would not work if they had it.  One afternoon in a bunk-house I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd.

“You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in you,” I remarked.  “All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot help telling you of my conviction:  that most of you are here because you are lazy.  Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him how to find work.”

The words had scarcely escaped my lips when a man by the name of Tim Grogan stood up and accepted the challenge.

I made an appointment to meet Grogan on Chatham Square at half-past five the next morning.  Before I met him, I had done more thinking on the question of the unemployed than I had ever done in my life.  I balked on the change of clothing article in the agreement—­and furnished my own.  Two or three men had enough courage to get up early in the morning and see Tim off—­they were sceptical about my intention.

The first thing that we did was to try the piano, soap and other factories on the West Side.  From place to place we went, from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street without success.  Sometimes under pretence of business and by force of the power to express myself in good English, I gained an entrance to the superintendent; but I always failed to find a job.  We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and went down the East Side.  Wherever men were working, we applied.  We went to the stevedores on the East Side, but they were all “full up.”  “For God’s sake,” I said to some of them, but I was brushed aside with a wave of the hand.  I never felt so like a beggar in my life.  Tim trotted at my heels, encouraging me with whimsical Irish phrases, one of which I remember—­

“Begorra, mister, the hardest work for sure is no work at all, at all!”

In the middle of the afternoon, I began to get disturbed; then I decided to try a scheme I had worked over for hours.  “Keep close to me, now, Tim,” I said, as I led him to a drugstore at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery.

“Sir,” I said to the clerk, “you are unaccustomed to giving credit, I know; but perhaps you might suspend your rule for once and trust us to the amount of five cents?”

“You don’t talk like a bum,” he said, “but you look like one.”

I thanked him for the compliment to my language, but insisted on my request.

“Well, what is it?” asked the clerk with somewhat of a sneer.

“I am hungry and thirsty.  I have looked for work all day and have utterly failed to find it.  Now I have a scheme and I know it will work.  Oxalic acid eats away rust.  If I had five cents’ worth, I could earn a dollar—­I know I could.”