bouncer and came over to his cot, which
was beside mine, and found him snoring. When all was quiet, the
bouncer said to me:

"What did ye tink of it, boss, hey?"

"Oh," I said, "that was a very tame show, and utterly uninteresting."

"Gee!" he said, "you must have been a barker at Coney Island."

The test of my theology on him proved a failure. The story of the
prodigal son was a great joke to him. He said of it:

"Say, bub, if you ever strike an old gazabo as soft as dat one, lemme
know, will ye?" Prayer to him was "talking through one's hat."

In a few weeks he straightened up and began to give me very fine
assistance in the bunk-house. His change of mind and heart almost lost
him his job, for he lost a good deal of his brutality--the thing that
fitted him for his work. In ushering insubordinate gentlemen
downstairs, he did it more with force of persuasion than with the
force of his shoe. He continued my campaign of cleaning, and decorated
the kalsomined walls with chromos that he bought at one penny apiece.
He was a psychologist and would have probably been surprised if
anybody had told him so. He could tell at once the moral worth of a
lodger; so he was a very good lieutenant and picked out the best of
the men who had reached the bottom--and the bunk-house was the bottom
rung of the social ladder. Every day he had his story to tell--of the
newcomers and their possibilities. His conversion was a matter of slow
work. Indeed, I don't know what conversion meant in his case. It
certainly was not the working out of any theological formula that I
had preached to him.

The telling of this man's story in churches helped the work a great
deal. It was the kind of thing that appealed to the churches--rather
graphic and striking; so, unconsciously we exploited him. We could
have gotten a hundred dollars to help a man like this--whose life
after all was past or nearly past--to one dollar we could get for the
work of saving a boy from such a life!

Among the most interesting characters that I came in contact with in
those days was Dave Ranney; he is now himself a missionary to the
Bowery lodging houses. I was going across Chatham Square one night,
when this man tapped me on the shoulder--"touched me"--he would call
it. He was "a puddler from Pittsburg," so he said.

"Show me your hands," I replied. Instead, he stuck them deep into his
trouser pockets, and I told him to try again. He said he was hungry,
so I took him to