correspond. But there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants only trained workers. "I'm real sorry," she says. "You're from the East, aren't you? I notice you speak with an accent."
By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling
the heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I say:
"I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."
"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two girls engaged already."
"Too late!" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:
"Say, are you sure those girls'll come? You can't always count on us, you know."
He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon press?"
"No, sir; but I'm awful handy."
"Where have you been working?"