"Help us out with this," said the farmer to me.
There were six of us altogether, and three went to each side of the machine and caught hold of it.
"Now, lift!" shouted the farmer.
The men at the other side lifted their end, but ours remained on the ground despite all efforts to raise it.
"Damn you, lift!" said my two mates angrily to me.
I put all my energy into the work, but the cold and hunger had taken the half of my strength away. We could not lift the machine clear of the ground. The farmer got angry.
"Get out of my sight, you spineless brat!" he roared to me, and I left the farmyard. When I came to the high-road again there were tears in my eyes. They were tears of shame; I was ashamed of my own weakness.
For a whole week afterwards I tramped through the country, hating all men, despised by everyone, and angry with my own plight. A few gave me food, some cursed me from their doors, and a great number mocked me as I passed. "Auld ragged breeks!" the children of the villages cried after me. "We're sick o' lookin' at the likes o' you!" the fat tubs of women, who stood by their cottage doors, said when I asked them for something to eat. Others would say: "Get out o' our sight, or we'll tell the policeman about you. Then you'll go to the lock-up, where you'll only get bread and water and a bed on a plank."
Such a dreadful thing! It shocked me to think of it, and for a while I always hurried away when women spoke in such a manner. However, in the end, suffering caused me to change my opinions. A man with an empty stomach may well prefer bread and water to water, a bed on a plank to a bed on the snow, and the roof of a prison to the cold sky over him. So it was that I came into Paisley again at the end of the week and asked a policeman to arrest me. I told him that I was hungry and wanted something to eat. The man was highly amused.
"You must break the law before the king feeds you," he said.