“I am perfectly willing to do so,” I replied.
The office was caged in by a heavy iron wire as though to be protected from thieves. The man at the desk said:
“Well, leave me your hat, and when you have done your work in the morning you will get it.”
I humbly handed him my hat, and numbering it he threw it on a pile of many others. He was obviously holding my hat as a ransom, fearing to trust my honor.
I was given a bed check corresponding to the number of my hat, and told to go upstairs. A man sat at a desk on which an old, smoky kerosene lamp was burning. He showed me into a room in which one hundred and sixteen men were sleeping. He did not turn up the light, even for a moment, so that I might see the kind of a bed I was getting into. He explained this by saying he feared to awaken the dead-tired, half-starved individuals on the bunks. As a result I was afraid to get into my bed at all, but laid down on the outside of the covering and stayed there all night. Not a word had been said about supper or a bath.
The odor of the hundred unwashed bodies was nauseating. There was the usual consumptive and asthmatic coughing, and the expectoration upon the floor; there were no cuspidors, and the air was stifling.
Not far from me I heard a young man moaning, and every few moments he would exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I went to him and asked:
“Oh, I am suffering from inflammatory rheumatism,” he groaned.
I felt of his arms and hands, and found them burning hot and swollen hard from his elbows to his finger-tips.