umbing was open, and the odours
coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and
from the hot air of the stove--windows and doors being tightly
closed--made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating.

After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory
to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to
the door he begged to be taken to the open air. When we got to Chatham
Square, he said--"Take me to a drugstore." Besant knew the underworld
of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen
anything quite so bestial, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house
on Mulberry Street.

It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of
New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery,
disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have
entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them,
I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were
lazy and would not work if they had it. One afternoon in a bunk-house
I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd.

"You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in
you," I remarked. "All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot
help telling you of my conviction: that most of you are here because
you are lazy. Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the
case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him
how to find work."

The words had scarcely escaped my lips when a man by the name of Tim
Grogan stood up and accepted the challenge.

I made an appointment to meet Grogan on Chatham Square at half-past
five the next morning. Before I met him, I had done more thinking on
the question of the unemployed than I had ever done in my life. I
balked on the change of clothing article in the agreement--and
furnished my own. Two or three men had enough courage to get up early
in the morning and see Tim off--they were sceptical about my
intention.

The first thing that we did was to try the piano, soap and other
factories on the West Side. From place to place we went, from
Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street without success. Sometimes under
pretence of business and by force of the power to express myself in
good English, I gained an entrance to the superintendent; but I always
failed to find a job. We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and
went down the East Side. Wherever men