olice come and carry us out and our household goods with us.

"It is true that we have had unusual difficulty in paying the rent and
in getting enough to eat and smoke; and this has not added to our
good-nature. You have no doubt read about the 'money stringency' in this
country. Times are indeed very hard, thousands of men are out of a job,
and the so-called criminals are very much in evidence. For a long time
Katie could not find work to do and could not get any of her money from
the bank, so that things looked very 'bohemian' around here for a while.
She could not get anything to do in her own line, and finally had to go
out to 'service.' But this she could not stand more than a week, for
Katie has fine qualities and is used to a certain amount of freedom, so
she couldn't stand the slavishness of the servant life, though she had
good wages and nice things to eat, which Katie likes very much.

"When Katie started in on this venture she had the proverbial thirty
cents, which she divided up with me--Terry had not returned from his
wanderings at that time--and I recklessly squandered ten cents of this
going to and returning from the Social Science League. In a day or two
there was nothing edible in our house but salt, so I squandered my
remaining nickel for bread. I made that loaf last me nearly four days: I
ate only when I was ravenously hungry, so that it would taste good, for
I hate rye bread. I slept a good deal of the time. I suffered terribly,
though, when my tobacco gave out, and I spent most of my time and energy
hunting old stumps, and I found several very good ones in the unswept
corners and under the beds. I even picked some out of the ashcan. These
I carefully collected, picked out the tobacco and rolled it in fresh
papers, as carefully as any professional hobo."

When Katie was temporarily hard up, that naturally put Terry and Marie
"on the bum." But they remained "true blue" and did not go to work,
Marie being willing to put up with all sorts of discomfort rather than
try for a job. She continued:

"It is a strange thing that nobody came to our house during these six
days. But on the sixth day, Terry came, and then I had a good square
meal, and he even left me carfare and some of the horrible stuff he
calls tobacco. Two more days elapsed before Katie returned. Until then I
lived on that square meal. I had ten cents from Terry, but I was sick of
rye bread. On the day that Katie returned, in fact only a few