not the slightest idea he was
the man, but he said:

"What a dastardly shame!"

I gripped him by the hands, and said, "You, my brother, are the man
who did it." I tightened my grip, and said, "And I forgive you as
fully and freely as I possibly can. You are sorry, and I am
satisfied."

I studied in the military schools for a first-class military
certification of education, and got my promotion; but no sooner had
the studies ceased and promotion come than the disgust with military
life and its restrictions increased with such force that it became
unbearable. So I left the service.

CHAPTER VI

BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD

I came to the United States in September, 1888. I came as a steerage
passenger. My first lodging on American soil was with one of the
earth's saints, a little old Irish woman who lived on East 106th
Street, New York City. I had served in Egypt with her son, and I was
her guest.

I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only
problem--that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in
this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was
disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night
and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help
Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I
first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the
unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first
discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my
first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in
what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless,
and many of them homeless.

An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a
"bed-hand"--whatever that might mean--led me to a big lodging-house on
the Bowery. They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up,
and the pay was one dollar a day. I got in line with the applicants. I
was about the forty-fifth man. Many a time I have wished that I could
understand what was passing in the clerk's mind when he dismissed me
with a wave of the hand. I thought, perhaps, that my dismissal meant
that he had engaged a man, but that was not the case. A man two or
three files behind me got the job.

My next attempt led me to a public school on Greenwich Avenue. The
janitor wanted an assistant. I was so weary with my inactivity, that
any kind of a job at any kind of pay would have bee