n acceptable. The
janitor showed me over the school, told me what his work was. Finally,
he took me to the cellar where he had piled up in a corner about
twenty lots of ashes. That, of course, was the first thing to be done,
and though the pile looked rather discouraging, I stripped to the
work, and went at it. My task was to get the ashes outside ready for
carting away. I was about six hours on the job, when I accidently
overheard the janitor say to his wife: "Shut your mouth, I have just
got a sucker of a greenhorn to get them out." That was enough. I got
my coat and hat, went over to the janitor's door, but before I could
open my mouth, his wife said: "What's up?"

"Oh, the job's all right," I replied, "but what I object to is the way
you do your whispering!"

The lowest in the scale of all human employments is the art of
canvassing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My
teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement. The janitor is the
traditional arch enemy of the canvasser. My teaching consisted largely
in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith--a
mythical Mrs. Smith--always lived on the top floor. I was taught to
interview her first; then I canvassed from the top down.

My district was on the East Side from Fourteenth to Forty-Second
Street. I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in
this region--so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid
missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that
tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its
work. I copied its "bill-of-fare" from the board outside the door, and
began, as time permitted, to attend its services. As an offset to the
discouragements I had experienced, I met in this small church two big
men--big, mentally and morally. They were brothers, and during my
twenty-one years in the United States, I have not met their superiors.
They were Lincoln and Frank Moss, both of them leaders in the church,
and although they had moved with the population northward, they
remembered the struggles of their childhood, and gave to it some of
their best manhood.

Selling sewing machines was a failure, but out of it came the
discovery of this splendid field for social and religious activity. I
was directed to the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. There, day after day,
I inquired at the Employment Department until the secretary seemed
tired of the sight of me.

I got ashamed to lo