“I’m hungry, but I’ll beg or steal before I’ll eat this stuff.”
We both got up and left the “Hawkins Street Woodyard” in disgust; he going down the street for breakfast, and I in another direction to my hotel.
During this, my social study, I have received many letters from the itinerant worker.[B]
I may add that I did not investigate Boston’s Associated Charities, but I did catch a suggestion or two that as far as helping the temporarily out-of-work and destitute toiler, both man and woman, they were inadequate and their good qualities did not exceed the “Hawkins Street Woodyard.”
Dressed in my garb of a worker, which encourages confidence because it excites sympathy, on another day, on the Boston Common, I was attracted by two idle men sitting on a nearby seat, one an Irishman and the other a Swede. They seemed to be feeling about as good as cheap Boston beer could make them, and the Irishman in an earnest yet jovial way was trying to convince the Swede that the world was flat instead of round. I dropped down on the seat beside them, and just then the Swede saw a man he thought he knew, and abruptly left us.
I turned and said to the Irishman in a tentative way, “Where can a fellow find a job?”
He replied, “Do what I’m doing. I’m an actor, and I’m playing the drunkard’s part in ‘The Price of a Man’s Soul,’ every night, over at Hell’s Corner on Tremont Street.”
This answer naturally surprised me; but without a trace of astonishment, and with seeming indifference, I said,
“I am with you, friend, for that is a part in which I sparkle; but on the square, what do you do for a living?”