u were. Montrose seemed endless to Chester as he stood
at the head of Water Street and gazed in bewilderment along one of its
main business avenues--a big, glittering, whirling place where one
small boy could so easily be swallowed up that he would never be heard
of again.

Chester, after paying his fare to Montrose and buying his cheese and
crackers, had just sixty cents left. This must last him until he found
work, so that the luxury of lodgings was out of the question, even if
he had known where to look for them. To be sure, there were benches in
a public square right in front of him; but Chester was afraid that if
he curled up on one of them for the night, a policeman might question
him, and he did not believe he could give a very satisfactory account
of himself. In his perplexity, he thought of his cosy lumber pile at
Roxbury Station and remembered that when he had left the boat he had
noticed a large vacant lot near the wharf which was filled with piles
of lumber. Back to this he went and soon succeeded in finding a place
to stow himself. His last waking thought was that he must be up and
doing bright and early the next morning, and that it must surely be
longer than twenty-four hours since he had crept downstairs and out of
Aunt Harriet's porch window at Upton.

* * * * *

Montrose seemed less alarming by daylight, which was not so
bewildering as the blinking electric lights. Chester was up betimes,
ate the last of his cheese and crackers and started out at once to
look for work. He determined to be thorough, and he went straight into
every place of business he came to, from a blacksmith's forge to a
department store, and boldly asked the first person he met if they
wanted a boy there. There was, however, one class of places Chester
shunned determinedly. He never went into a liquor saloon. The last
winter he had been allowed to go to school in Upton, his teacher had
been a pale, patient little woman who hated the liquor traffic with
all her heart. She herself had suffered bitterly through it, and she
instilled into her pupils a thorough aversion to it. Chester would
have chosen death by starvation before he would have sought for
employment in a liquor saloon. But there certainly did not seem room
for him anywhere else. Nobody wanted a boy. The answer to his question
was invariably "No." As the day wore on, Chester's hopes and courage
went down to zero, but he still tramped dogged