ox hospital at the same time, though a full house of sixteen
hundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted. But they made
up for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome features of their
disease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way. I learned that the
average mortality was one in six, that one of them had been in three
months and the other three months and a half, and that they had been
"rotten wi' it." Whereat my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked
them how long they had been out. One had been out two weeks, and the
other three weeks. Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured
the other that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their
hands and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out. Nay,
one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went, right
out of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up smaller inside my
clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope that it had not
popped on me.

In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their being
"on the doss," which means on the tramp. Both had been working when
smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital "broke,"
with the gloomy task before them of hunting for work. So far, they had
not found any, and they had come to the spike for a "rest up" after three
days and nights on the street.

It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by disease or
accident. Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger" we called
him--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication that he had
been waiting since one o'clock. A year before, one day, while in the
employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of fish which was
too much for him. Result: "something broke," and there was the box on
the ground, and he on the ground beside it.

At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said it
was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to rub on it,
kept him four hours, and told him to get along. But he was not on the
streets more than two or three hours when he was down on his back again.
This time he went to another hospital and was patched up. But the point
is, the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man injured in
his employment, and even refused him "a light job now and again," when he
came out. As far a