I paid for the food for a week. He tried also to obtain work, but I think the sight of my anxious face worried him—I have learned not to carry sorrow in my face since then. That boy slipped through our fingers and went back to crime. Now, at whose hands will that soul, anxious for better things, be required?
Before I went for my summer vacation I urged before the Board an industrial plant. Mr. Kline strenuously objected. During that vacation I laid the matter very fully before God in prayer and felt constrained to urge the starting of an industrial work.
At our first meeting in September Mr. Kline said, “Brethren, I have come to see the need of an industrial plant, not only so that men can earn lodging, but where, after conversion, we can keep a man a few days to teach him the way of life.” A Mission worker often prays himself into light.
Again I was forced to borrow money with which to purchase a horse and wagon. Mrs. Spindle loaned me the $150 needed. That fall my little book, called “The Life of Gustavus Adolphus,” published by The Lutheran Publication Society, Philadelphia, came out. The house gave me $25 in cash, if I remember correctly, and 100 copies of the book, which I sold at 40 cents a copy. So I gave the $65 of my own on the horse and wagon in paying back Mrs. Spindle for the loan.
In some way we also secured a paper baler, thus we gave two men work in collecting books, newspapers, etc., and two men at the baler. In the November Gospel Tidings we announced that the wagon from the Gospel Mission would call on the first and fifteenth of the month, and would accept papers, rags, clothes, bottles, etc., saying, “We have old men who separate these things and label and bale this material.” The money was used to feed and care for these unfortunates.
The city people responded most generously, and in this way our industrial branch was started, and greatly benefited the Mission for two and a half years.
Later we obtained a wood-saw run by a gasoline engine, and we started the penny bundling industry, where we could use eight or ten men and make the double purpose of work for unfortunate men and yet make the industry self-supporting.
When the United States granted wood pulp to be brought into the country free of duty, our paper industry was destroyed, as we could not sell the paper, and the government took our woodyard and killed our wood industry, but they both did much good in their day.
The Gospel Mission in the fall of 1914 will again open a laundry, wood cutting, rope-making, printing, and chair caning in the line of industries for men who will gladly work rather than eat the bread of charity.