“I am so small no one would hire me,” he replied. "I could get errands to do now and then. Of course, while my mother lived she kept a home for me, but after she died I did not know what to do. I only sat in the house day after day and looked out of the window. I could not make any plans for myself. You see when I was a baby I fell and injured my back. I didn’t grow much more after that accident. The doctors called it a curvature."
He laughed easily as he asked me, "You know the poem of James Whitcomb Riley,
‘I’m th’ust a little cripple boy
An’ never going to grow,
An’ git a great big man at all,
‘Cause auntie told me so.’
“I rather think I’m that boy. One time I chanced to find that poem and read it to my mother. She took the book from me in the gentle way she had, and then putting her arms around me, told me to be a good boy and everything would come out all right. But they never did come all right. Maybe I was not good enough; but this can’t interest you. You hear enough hard luck stories without mine.”
“If you wish to tell me,” I said, “I shall be quite glad to listen.”
“Well, it’s only this,” he continued. "Left to myself, I wasn’t smart enough to make a living. I can’t get my room rent and my lunch money all at the same time. If I have my lunches I have no room, and if I have a room I have nothing to eat."
He grew very serious. He could laugh at his misshapen back, make a jest at his deformity, but hunger—even at the thought of hunger—the smile left his face, the color fled from his lips.