n the clay bank in front
of my door. Later I went out through the surrounding towns and cities,
lecturing, and raised money for a chapel, and we called it the "Chapel
of the Carpenter."

I never knew the meaning of the incarnation until I lived on "the
bottoms" with the squatters. I talked of great characters of history;
I reviewed great books. I travelled with these children over the great
highways of history, science and art, and very soon we had a strong
Sunday School, and helpers came from the city--but the door of my own
soul was still shut. It seemed to me that my soul was dead. I was
without hope for myself: everything around me was dark. Sometimes I
locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor
thoughts--not a ray of light penetrated the darkness. My mind and
intellect became duller and duller. It was at this time that I came
across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me
a method of relief. I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his
philosophy that made me reason that, as I did not ask to come into
life and had no option, I had a right to go out of it. There was
nothing spasmodic in the development of my thought along this line: it
was cold, calm reasoning; I had determined to go out of life. So, with
the same calm deliberation that I cooked my breakfast, I destroyed
every vestige of my correspondence; and, one night went to the river
to seek relief. I was sitting on the end of a log when a man, who had
been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after
his supper. He had not washed himself. His bloody shirt stuck to his
skin--he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into
conversation. In language intelligible to him I asked him what life
meant to him.

"The kids," he said, "that's what it means to me. I work like one of
the things I kill every day--I kill hundreds of them, thousands of
them every day. I go home and eat like one of them, and sleep like one
of them, and go back to hog it again like one of them."

"Do you get tired?"

"Tired? Tired as hell!"

"I mean--tired of life?"

"Oh, no," he said, "I aint livin' the best kind of a life, but what I
have is better than none. I don't know what's beyond--if there is any
life or none at all; but something in me makes me stick to this one.
Besides, if there is any chance for a better life here, he must be a
damned coward that would go out of it and leave it undone. Good
night."

I saw hi