t among them I also noticed many carpenter's tools and so forth.
That might be a useful thing to remember.

It was odd how in a day our point of view had changed. If I had
brought Ruth and the boy down through here a month before, we would
all, I think, have been more impressed by the congestion and the
picturesque details of the squalor than anything else. We would have
picked our way gingerly and Ruth would have sighed often in pity and,
comparing the lives of these people with our own, would probably have
made an extra generous contribution to the Salvation Army the next
time they came round. I'm not saying now that there isn't misery
enough there and in every like section of every city, but I'll say
that in a great many cases the same people who grovel in the filth
here would grovel in a different kind of filth if they had ten
thousand a year. At that you can't blame them greatly for they don't
know any better. But when you learn, as I learned later, that some of
the proprietors of these second hand stores and fly-blown butcher
shops have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wellesley, it makes you
think. But I'm running ahead.

The point was that now that we felt ourselves in a way one of these
people and viewed the street not from the superior height of
native-born Americans but just as emigrants, neither the soiled
clothes of the inhabitants nor the cluttered street swarming with
laughing youngsters impressed us unfavorably at all. The impassive men
smoking cigarettes at their doors looked contented enough, the women
were not such as to excite pity, and if you noticed, there were as
many children around the local soda water fountains as you'd find in a
suburban drug store. They all had clothes enough and appeared well fed
and if some of them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores was
enough to account for that.

At any rate we came back to our flat that day neither depressed nor
discouraged but decidedly in better spirits. Of course we had seen
only the surface and I suspected that when we really got into these
lives we'd find a bad condition of things. It must be so, for that was
the burden of all we read. But we would have time enough to worry
about that when we discovered it for ourselves.

CHAPTER VI

I BECOME A DAY LABORER

That night Ruth and I had a talk about the boy. We both came back from
our walk, with him more on our minds than anything else. He had been
interested in everything and h