“Can’t I go out and get something for you?” I anxiously asked.
“I don’t know what to tell you to get. I need a doctor.”
I called an attendant. The sufferer asked if he could get a doctor from the city hall across the street.
“No, not until nine o’clock to-morrow morning,” was the answer.
The man had two rags about twelve inches long and three inches wide. All night long, at intervals of every twenty or thirty minutes, he went to the water faucet, wet these rags, and bound them upon his arms.
I thought by contrast of New York City’s wonderful Municipal Emergency Home, and of the kind medical treatment given at any hour of the night to its inmates.
On arising in the morning we went down-stairs and waited an hour for our breakfasts. We could see our hats piled up behind the iron bars.
When the long wait was over, we were given a breakfast consisting of dry bread, stewed prunes, and some liquid stuff called coffee, without milk or sugar. What a hungry man would eat at that table, if he had been able to stomach it, wouldn’t amount to a value of over three cents a meal. While we ate we were supposed to refresh ourselves spiritually by reading the religious mottoes on the wall. “Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” “Blessed are the Merciful,” “He came to preach deliverance to the captives,” and “When did you write Mother last?”
After that so-called breakfast I was sent to work in the long, poorly ventilated room, in which the hundred and sixteen men, unwashed, diseased, and foul, had slept the previous night. I worked two long hours making beds and cleaning floors, in payment of the three-cent meal I could not eat, and the bed I dared not get into. The Mission people valued our meal at ten cents, and our beds at ten cents, and we were paying for it at labor at ten cents an hour, while at every other place in the city employers and the municipality were paying twenty and twenty-five cents an hour for common labor.
The boys who had paid their ten cents for a bed sat out in the office, and stood a chance of getting a job at twenty or twenty-five cents an hour at the labor bureau, but the boys whose hats were held as a ransom had no such opportunity.