MADE many other abortive attempts. Details seem irrelevant.
One morning when I awoke my face felt strangely wet and cold. On carefully lifting myself, penetrated as I was with a feeling of otherworldliness, I found that the outline of my body, as I lay in the bush, was softened by a mound of snow. The snow had come down soft-footedly, over night, like a benediction. I had slept through it all; my fire had gone out.
My body did not feel cold; not in the least. There seemed such a lightness, speaking of weight as well as of colour, in everything, that the illusion, had it lasted, might have persuaded me that I was still dreaming. I sank back to my bed of willow-boughs and lay there, staring thoughtlessly at the world transformed. Gradually, as my circulation adjusted itself to the quickened pace of wakefulness, my face began to glow, my ears to tingle. Infinite comfort seemed to creep through my limbs; it was good to lie still. My worries seemed dead and forgotten. I thought of nothing with any degree of intensity.
I seemed to review my life as you may look on at a play when your seat is too far from the stage to understand the words: you miss, therefore, all the vital connections: tragedy may be a farce; comedy may touch you with tears. I lay for hours. I was utterly indifferent to everything except the strange feeling of comfort, of well-being. I dozed again.
Hours later, I started up. This time a wild fear possessed me; a feeling of being hunted and tracked. I sat and stared blankly. Everything was dripping. The

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snow on the ground and the bushes was a mere slush. The sun was getting in his work.
I felt my pulse. My watch had been spoiled when I lost my raft; so I could not count the beats; but even thus I could feel that my blood was racing through my veins at fever-rate. I rose in terror, picked my things up, and started to stumble blindly along the beach. I do not know how far or how long I went. But I know that some time during the day, when the snow had melted and showed only here and there in patches along the hollows of the opposite, southern bank of the river, the sky became overcast; the usual wind sprang up, a bleak, raw, wintry wind that drove huge waves on the river upstream. Simultaneously, I believe, I began to cough: a hard, dry, racking cough that brought sharp pain to my side and the lower part of my chest. I began to grope along the steep but low bank which followed the curves of the beach at some little distance from the water. I had to stop often; when the cough caught me, I had to bend down, to support myself with my hands on stones, roots, fallen logs.
At last I found a sandy nook in this bank and lay down again. I had not eaten all day; but I had wetted my lips repeatedly with water from the river.
The wind howled dismally through the bare stems overhead. One of the last things which I observed was that the river was rising fast. I slept. A fitful sleep it was, filled with ravings and nightmares, and broken by frightful attacks of that dry cough which seemed to shake my body.
Again I awoke with a wild start in the morning -- a start which this time sent me up on my feet. I had to clutch at things in order not to fall. Then I saw the river. It had risen prodigiously. It was full of drift. But the drift consisted, not of logs and boards, not of household articles and fruits of the field, but of large slabs of ice which danced wildly in the wind-lashed floods.
I was beyond myself with unreasoning fear.
I could not stand; I could not walk. I peered up the

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steep bank and caught sight of the edge of a roof; but between the house and myself rose a formidable hedge of honey-locust with thorns like daggers, ten twelve inches long.
I struggled up to the hedge; and then I broke or stumbled through it, the huge thorns tearing my clothes and lacerating my flesh with their points. I emerged into the yard of a small farm, swept by the tearing, icy gale.
To the right stood a house. I went to the door and knocked.
A man came out, closing the door behind him. He was in shirt and trousers only, bareheaded and barefooted; and as he stepped out, he shrugged into the shoulder-loops of his suspenders; he had apparently just been getting up. His empty face expressed only horror at my sight.
I swayed, And the words I spoke came in a painful gasp.
"Have you some stable?" I asked. "A hayloft. I came down the river. I'm sick. I've got to get out of the wind."
He hastened to lead me around the house. I followed, holding on to house and trees to steady myself and not to fall headlong. We came to the barn. It was of that half-open type that marks the tobacco-barn, boards and open spaces alternating in the walls. He opened the door. The floor was a mire of manure and trampled-up mud.
I shook my head and waved my hand in his face. "Won't do," I gasped, "too wet."
I could see that the man was nearly scared out of his wits. He slammed the door shut and looked about.
"The smoke-house," he said; "it isn't warm, but its dry We aren't using it."
Again he led the way.
The smoke-house was a tiny building opposite the dwelling. Its walls were slatted only, but there were all sorts of discarded things in it which offered shelter; the floor was dry.
I nodded, and the man left me.
I sank down and rested. Then I began to crawl about

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on all fours, like a beast in distress, trying to find the most sheltered spot, not by looking for it, but by the sense of feeling only.
After a while -- I must have been lying there for an hour or longer -- the door opened, and I saw a woman of ample proportions, a small boy hanging on to her skirts and peering around them, half impertinent, half frightened. The woman looked at me.
"You're pretty sick," she said. "I bring you some broth."
"Put it down," I replied. "Put it on the floor there."
And she placed it within reach of my hand. She hesitated a moment; and then she went away.
I shivered in my chill. After a while I propped myself up, reached for the cup, drank what I did not spill, and sank down again. I lost consciousness.
Hours later I felt that I was being handled. The woman was bending over me.
"We are going to take you into the house," she said.
I offered no resistance. I did not care. But while they laboured in supporting me across the yard, a paroxysm of spasmodic coughing seized me; and when they stopped, trying to uphold me, I noticed a boy hitching a very mockery, a veritable skate of a horse to a decrepit buckboard.
I lost consciousness again.
Days, maybe weeks intervened of which I know nothing.
But through those weeks, scattered in, as it were, among the fever-phantasies and nightmares of my illness, there flit visions of a man who was deftly putting his fingers to my chest and applying a stethoscope.
Him I see very distinctly when I close my eyes. A medium-sized, quiet, unobtrusive man in a black suit, awkward-looking, with hard, gnarly fingers, a coarse, angular face marked by a grey moustache, his shoulders sloping, his neck enclosed in a stiff, very white, but home-laundered fold-back collar with a ready-made black bow

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tie -- the kind that fastens with a rubber-loop and a crescent-shaped pasteboard shield.
A homely figure; ridiculous in its stiff clothes which are too large; I cannot help laughing when I think of him and how he looked; but the laughter is undershot with tears; a strange lump rises in my throat. No offence is meant, doctor, if I laugh at you! Believe me, I bow down to the very earth and touch the ground with my brow!
A consultation took place. I was conscious again by that time of what was going on around me; I was very, very weak; so weak that I could not move my hand without help.
There were three men in the room. "My" doctor and two others, slick and competent-looking men who fairly dwarfed my doctor as they applied their instruments to my chest. I wondered.
A weird conversation took place in which formidable and learned words caught my ear; words like "hyperresonant rather than hyporesonant" -- "hematogenic" -- "peribronchial", and others. "My" doctor hardly took part in the discussion; with an apologetic smile he listened; and as I watched his face, I could see, now agreement, now disagreement under that smile. His whole mind seemed to become transparent to my eyes. When one of the young men wound up with, "The prognosis is bad, if not hopeless. Don't you agree, doctor?" he shrugged his shoulders; his smile seemed to become ever so slightly ironic.
The young men took their leave with elaborate, formal courtesy which but thinly disguised their contempt for their homely colleague who thanked them humbly for their help.
As soon as they were gone, "my" doctor got busy. It was the first time that I consciously heard him talking. I remember every word.
"Oh, these young doctors," he said. "They have had so much more of a chance than I ever had! They know so much more! They are so much abler! They have so much more confidence in their diagnosis! When I went to

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college, we did not have half the opportunities! We were sent out very inadequately equipped indeed. But I am going to wager on Nature. I am going to help Nature along the slightest little bit. I am going to give her a chance to get in her work."
And he rolled me over on my side and bared my back.
"Now, my dear young man," he went on. " I am going to hurt you. I am going to push a pretty stout needle in between your ribs. Here it is," and he showed me. "As I said, it is going to hurt; but I cannot help that. The more it hurts, the greater the hope for you. Pain is not pleasant, I know; but it is an attribute of life."
He was working with wonderfully deft fingers on my back, at the lower edge of the ribs. Those gnarled hands of his were not clumsy. The smell of ether struck my nostrils; he was squirting it at the skin of my back. And then, suddenly, I felt him gather a lump of flesh in one sure unfailing hand, a hand that knew what it was about -- and the next moment the other hand pushed the needle through that upgathered flesh, in between the ribs and through my body. And from my lungs there detached itself, against my will, a yell of pain.
I heard the doctor's quiet, reassuring laugh.
"Good," he said, "fine! Why, there must be a great reserve of strength left if you can still yell that way. One day you are going to be a noted athlete yet. The pain is all over now. Of course, it does not feel natural to have that needle in your chest. But it will take only a few more minutes. Only a very few minutes now. I am working the aspirator."
And thus he talked on; and at last he said, "Now one more second. I am going to withdraw the needle and then you will be all right; on the road back to health and strength if Nature wills it."
I sank into a sleep; and when I awoke, the pain was gone.
From that day dated my recovery. One morning when

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the doctor called I tried to speak; but he laid his hand on my mouth.
"Not yet, my friend," he said. "Not yet. To-morrow maybe. You are doing fine. Soon, soon we are going to sit up. But not yet. And no talking yet. But the time is coming fast."
I began to take note of my surroundings. I was still in that house on the riverbank. I was lying on a wide, soft bed opposite an open window through which the wintry air came in, pleasantly cold. Snow was on the ground and lay in heavy layers on the branches of an evergreen outside. There were goings and comings into the room, and gradually I realized that I was lying in the kitchen of a two-roomed house. I do not know how the next bit of information reached me; but I found out that this family of four with whom I was staying had moved into the parlour. I was lying in the one bed which they owned. They were sleeping on straw spread on the floor, there, in their dingy parlor. The fat woman was nursing me under the doctor's direction. The whole household had reorganized itself with this one view, to save me from dying. Poverty was written all over the place; but I lacked nothing that might be needed.
A thought began to puzzle me. One day I asked the doctor when he sat on the edge of my bed.
"Doctor," I said in a thin, strange voice, "who's paying for all this?"
"Don't think of that," he said. "Get well first. You are among friends."
When he had gone, I beckoned the fat woman to come.
"Who is paying for all this?" I whispered.
She smiled. "Doctor Goodwin says you are not to worry."
"But I do," I replied.
"Well, don't," she admonished. "We'd be willing to do it for the Lord, but the doctor won't let us."
So I knew.

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"Why do you do all this?" I asked the doctor the next time.
He smiled his deprecating smile. "Your case has been interesting," he said. "I am always glad to take on a case from which I can learn.
"I am a tramp, doctor" I said on another occasion. "Just a common tramp."
"You're not," he replied. "Don't do an injustice to yourself. You may have been tramping, but you are not a tramp. There's a difference."
"How do you know?"
"I can tell," he said; "and what does it matter?"
Then, as my strength returned, we talked.
"Our policy is at fault," he said. "We lose sight of the immigrant. But I suppose it is the same all over the world."
"It is, and it isn't," I replied.
He looked a question.
"Who would think of going to England, to France, to Sweden -- anywhere," I argued, "without carefully laidout plans and prearranged connections?"
"Yes," he agreed, "there is something in that. We invite the immigrant. We tell him, Come and you will find freedom and economic independence. And when he follows the call, we turn him loose to shift for himself."
"You even forbid him to make arrangements beforehand. And think of the countless thousands who do not even know the language of the country."
"I know," he said. "I've sometimes thought of that. Unless they gather in alien communities, they become a prey to sharp practice."
"And it is the one who comes in good faith who suffers most," I went on. "You match two men for a fight. One you strip of his weapons; the other one you leave fully equipped. "
The doctor got up. "Don't rub it in," he said.
But I did. "And because they are foreigners, you turn them over to the scoffing derision of thoughtless ignorance.


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No wonder you remain foreign to them. Yet they, too, have made part of America."
"Yes," he said. "In one sense they have."
"Are you done with tramping?" he asked when I had told him part of what I have told in this record.
"No," I said, "I have only begun. So far I have drifted. After this I want to drive."
"I think I understand," he smiled. "But you can't go on now. You will have to lay off for the winter."
"If I can find work."
"Don't worry. Get well. We have provided for that."
I wondered who "we" might be; but I did not ask.
I was sitting up again. I was relearning to walk. My recovery was rapid; the doctor's calls became rarer; I missed them.
One day, he took me out for a ride in his buggy. It was a mild winter day; gratefully I drew the air into my healing lungs. I waited for him in his vehicle whenever he entered a house to make a call. All his calls were made in poor country-houses -- his clientele was not among the well-to-do nor in the nearby town.
Then, on our way back, he broached the subject which he had been pondering.
"I don't know," he said, "how you feel about it. We have a mill in town, a veneer-factory. How are you with tools?"
I laughed. "Give me a hammer and a nail, and you can rely on my hitting the wrong one. But it doesn't matter."
"The druggist, too," he said, "is looking for a clerk."
"No," I said, "no selling for me. Let it be the mill. I'd like to try out what it is to be a hand."
"Well," he replied "I've spoken to the manager. They are shorthanded all the time. We'll fix you up."
"Will they take the vagrant?"
"You are no vagrant now. You have a roof over-head."

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"Doctor," I said inconsequentially, "what is the difference between a jail-bird and a respectable man?"
"The respectful man is forehanded," he replied, looking puzzled. "He has an intenser fear of the future and a greater desire for manifold things."
"True," I said; "you might add, a greater dependency on the judgment of his neighbours. But that was not what I meant."
"Morally speaking?" he asked.
"Ethically," I nodded.
"None, necessarily," he answered. "It all depends."
"Doctor," I laughed, "you are an anarchist. I have suspected for some time that all really good people are anarchists."
He, too, laughed. "Of sorts," he agreed. "But the really intelligent man, no matter who he is, longs for one thing above all."
"What is that?" I asked.
"Production."
"I have lived off the land," I objected.
"A child," he said sententiously, "is entitled to his infancy."
I felt very grateful for that word.
"The Abraham Lincolns live all around." I added after a while
"Who are they?" he asked.
"You are one of them," I said.
He frowned quizzically, but kept silent.
And so we returned to what, for the time being, was my home.
A week or two later he dropped in again. I was walking in the yard, looking down on the frozen river, when he pulled his pony in. I smiled and went to meet him.
"Get your coat," he said. "Jump in. I want to show you something."
We drove to town. At the edge of the village he stopped in front of a tiny house; he tied his horse.
"Come on," he said, "I've got the key."


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The tiny house held one room, eighteen by eighteen feet. There was a small stove, a bed with a mattress and a blanket, a plain deal table, and one chair.
"I'll charge you two dollars a month for rent," he said. "The stove costs two and a half. You owe for it at the hardware store. The bed was given by one of the bankers who wants to be nameless. Table, chair, and blanket are mine, to be returned when no longer needed. You will want some dishes, maybe, and similar things. I am going on your security at the general store. As for fuel, I advise to get half a ton of coal at the yard. That will set you back another two dollars; but it will be cheaper than gathering drift, for you will need to husband your strength. You better stay right here now. To-morrow we shall go to the mill. My office is across the road. You might call there at nine o'clock."
"But I cannot leave those people without thanking them or saying good-by," I objected.
"Well," he said, "they wanted it so. You will see them later."
Thus, that day, I set up a bachelor's establishment.
Next morning we went down to the mill by the river.
I was bewildered when we entered the huge brick building -- bewildered by the roar of machinery and the great number of men handling logs, planks, and all kinds of timber in all stages of finish or lack of finish. But more than anything else one thing struck me: these men who were, so it seemed, mere parts of the intricate machines they fed did not seem to mind it in the least: they had time to joke and to laugh.
Doctor Goodwin led me into a small room on the ground-floor, a room which was partitioned off from the rest of the building, but which nevertheless seemed to shake with the pulse of the work.
He bade me wait while he went away, upstairs.
After a while he returned, accompanied by a tall, fleshy man of truly senatorial proportions. This man moved about in a detached sort of way, as if he did not

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care where he was or went; but on closer observation I saw that his alert little eyes were shooting about in all directions.
"Well," he said when he entered, "so this is the young man?"
And he looked at me with a humorous flicker in his grey-blue eyes. "We can always use an additional hand," he said with a note of irony and the slightest possible emphasis on the last word. "The doctor tells me you are long on brains and short on muscle?"
"I am afraid," I said, "as far as the muscles are concerned, the doctor is right."
"Well," he went on, "as it happens, we need a fellow with an ounce or so of brains just now. In the glue-room. Things are not going there as they should. We make veneers, you know. But we also sell table tops and such things ready veneered. That is a side-line with us, lately introduced. And somehow it has not been a success. We are always behind our orders, way behind. And we are thinking of dropping the whole department for lack of the right kind of a man. It is not a nice place to work in. It is hot, there. Everything needs to be hot. Glue does not smell like perfume, either." And he paused with an ironical, questioning inclination of his head.
"Never mind," I said; "where others can work, I can, I suppose."
"That's the spirit," he replied, still with his ironical drawl. "There are three hands working there now. But they are mere boys. They don't have much sense of responsibility. Naturally, we have to draw on the town for our help; and the glue-room is not popular. The best men do not care to go down there. But if I put you in, I should expect you to see to it that we catch up with the work. Three men should be able to keep the store room empty. But one of them has to be the boss. Of course, I cannot engage you as foreman of a department. You will have to start in on the wages of a helper. But

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unless you make yourself the boss, you know, you can be of no use to the mill."
Again he paused questioningly. He spoke very much "de-haut-en-bas". But that, I found later, was his way with everybody, even with his fellow-citizens of high standing in the town.
I smiled ruefully. "Well, sir," I said, "I suppose you know all about myself. I am afraid I shall disappoint you."
"The work does not need to be hard," he went on. "It is a case of using an ounce of brains or so."
"It is not that," I said. "But will the boys obey a man who is new in the country?"
"Well," he drawled, "if it is any comfort to you, I will tell you this. The best worker we have at present -- I mean by that, the man who is most anxious to do an honest day's work for a day's wages -- is a Russian who has been in this country only four months. He is just beginning to pick up his first words of English. He has no education, either. In fact, he can neither read nor write. He was quite unskilled when we shipped him out from Pittsburg. He is kiln-boss now."
"If you will risk it," I said.
He turned and looked out into the machine-floor. He raised a finger to a man who was walking about, there, inspecting the work of the roaring machines. A shout would not have availed out there.
The man came, deferential in his bearing.
"Mansfield," said the manager, "this man here -- his name is Branden -- will report to-morrow morning for work in the glue-room. See me about him later on. Better show him around."
"All right, sir," replied the foreman.
And with a brief nod the manager turned away; and Doctor Goodwin followed him.
Mansfield, a short man with quick, shifty-looking eyes in an elderly, colourless face, beckoned to me to follow him as he began to thread his way among the machines. When he came to an elevator-shaft, he stopped and pressed a

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button. The open platform of the elevator began to descend. It was encumbered with two low-wheeled trucks loaded with "cores" of worm-eaten chestnut wood.
We descended. It was cool down there, in that huge store-room of the basement. Cores of various sizes, similar to these on the trucks, were piled all around to the height of the ceiling. The whole centre of this basement was occupied by long strips of veneers of quarter-sawed oak, mahogany and poplar.
"Arrears," said Mansfield, pointing with a sweep of his arm, and he laughed. "Need a boss here to catch up."
We went along one of the main aisles, ducking under swinging belts and whirling shafts. Even down here Mansfield had to speak at the top of his voice in order to make himself understood.
Then we came to the glue-room. Intense heat struck us like a blow when we entered. Wide racks of hot steampiping were loaded with cores. Veneers were spread on long, shelf-like desks. A huge hydraulic press occupied the centre of the room. Along the far wall glue boiled in steam-jacketed pots. The smell was certainly not like perfume; more like that of burning fishbones.
Three young boys were working here, none of them, more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They scanned me with curious looks.
We left the room through a door at the opposite end.
"Can't get a decent man to take hold here," said Mansfield. "It's the heat and the smell."
"I don't mind," I said, "but I don't know anything about the work."
"You'll learn," he replied.
"When do I start?"
"At six sharp, second whistle."
I was a factory-hand.

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