wnbroker for
five dollars. And for all I know the pawnbroker still has the suit. I
had never intended to redeem it.

But I couldn't get any work. Yet I was a bargain in the labour market.
I was twenty-two years old, weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds
stripped, every pound of which was excellent for toil; and the last
traces of my scurvy were vanishing before a treatment of potatoes chewed
raw. I tackled every opening for employment. I tried to become a studio
model, but there were too many fine-bodied young fellows out of jobs. I
answered advertisements of elderly invalids in need of companions. And I
almost became a sewing machine agent, on commission, without salary. But
poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times, so I was forced to
forgo that employment.

Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous
occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and roustabout. But
winter was coming on, and the surplus labour army was pouring into the
cities. Also I, who had romped along carelessly through the countries of
the world and the kingdom of the mind, was not a member of any union.

I sought odd jobs. I worked days, and half-days, at anything I could
get. I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat them, and laid
them again. Further, I took the civil service examinations for mail
carrier and passed first. But alas! there was no vacancy, and I must
wait. And while I waited, and in between the odd jobs I managed to
procure, I started to earn ten dollars by writing a newspaper account of
a voyage I had made, in an open boat down the Yukon, of nineteen hundred
miles in nineteen days. I didn't know the first thing about the
newspaper game, but I was confident I'd get ten dollars for my article.

But I didn't. The first San Francisco newspaper to which I mailed it
never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript, but held on to it. The
longer it held on to it the more certain I was that the thing was
accepted.

And here is the funny thing. Some are born to fortune, and some have
fortune thrust upon them. But in my case I was clubbed into fortune, and
bitter necessity wielded the club. I had long since abandoned all
thought of writing as a career. My honest intention in writing that
article was to earn ten dollars. And that was the limit of my intention.
It would help to tide me along until I got steady employment. Had a
vacancy occurred in the post office