“She wanted me to go along, but I knew Mr. Rollings didn’t like me, and besides I wanted to stay East where there was some chance of my finding out who my parents were. I got a place as cash boy in a Japanese store and boarded with some people who lived across the hall from where the Morriseys had their rooms.
“But Mr. Benton used to get drunk and when he was that way he’d beat me, just for the fun of it, it seemed to me. Then when they cut down the number of boys employed in the store and I couldn’t find another place right away, he growled so about my not paying my board that I did my things up in a bundle one night and hid myself on a canal boat down at the East River docks.
“The captain was awful mad when he found me after we had got clear up the North River. He gave me a good thrashing and then said he was going to drop me overboard. But he didn’t and I stayed on board all that season, driving mules and being sworn at and kicked and trounced like any other boy on the canal. I sometimes wonder why I didn’t wear out.
“When navigation closed I was set adrift, and had a hard scrub of it to get along for a time. I almost starved for a while in Albany, trying to pick up odd jobs. Then I came near freezing to death.
“Finally I got a place as errand boy in a grocery store and kept that till some money was missing and they said I took it. I never stole in my life. Mrs. Morrisey brought me up too well for me to do that. But I couldn’t prove I didn’t and I had to go. The man said I ought to consider myself lucky I wasn’t sent to jail.
“After that I had a worse time of it than ever. Whenever I applied for a position they wanted to know why I had left my last place. And when I told them, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
“Then came the days when sometimes I thought I might as well steal, I was suffering because I was accused of doing it. When I was very hungry and saw chances of sneaking apples out of grocery-men’s barrels, it seemed as if I had almost a right to do it. But I never did.
“Something always turned up to keep me from starving. Once a woman stopped me in the street and gave me a dollar. She said I looked so hungry she couldn’t go by me without doing it.
“Another time I was taken sick in one of the parks, something like Rex. I fell down in a kind of faint, and when I came to I was in a hospital and I stayed there quite a little while.
“After I got out it was spring and I thought I’d try the country. I didn’t beg; only asked for work. Sometimes I got it; many more times I didn’t.