The association with my old friends made life a wholly different thing for me, and I made through them many new friends. They were very poor and did not count for much in the world; but they were real people, and their life, simple and insignificant as it was, was real and without sham. I found, indeed, that one got much nearer to the poor than to the better class—their life was more natural; small things matter so much more to them. In fact, the smallest thing may be a great thing to a poor man. Also I found a kindness and generosity quite out of proportion to that of the well-to-do. However poor and destitute a man or a family might be there was always some one poorer and more destitute, and they gave with a generosity that was liberality, indeed. For they gave of their penury what was their living. Whatever the organized charities may do, and they do much, the poor support the poor and they rely on each other to an extent unknown among their more fortunate fellow-citizens. As the Egyptian always stops to lift another's load, so here I found men always turning in to lend their aid.
Thus, gradually in the association of my friends who were working among the poor and helping to carry their burdens, I began to find a new field and to reap in it a content to which I had long been a stranger. Also life began to take on for me a wholly new significance; as a field of work in which a man might escape from the slavery of a selfish convention which cramped the soul, into a larger life where service to mankind was the same with service to God, a life where forms were of small import and where the Christian and the Jew worked shoulder to shoulder and walked hand in hand. How much of my new feeling was due to Miss Eleanor Leigh, I did not take the trouble to consider.
"Father," said Eleanor, that evening, "I have a poor man whom I want a place for, and I must have it."
Mr. Leigh smiled. "You generally do have. Is this one poorer than those others you have saddled on me?"
"Now don't be a tease. Levity is not becoming in a man of your dignity. This man is very poor, indeed, and he has a houseful of children—and his wife——"
"I know," said Mr. Leigh, throwing up his hand with a gesture of appeal. "I surrender. They all have. What can this one do? Butts says every foreman in the shops is complaining that we are filling up with a lot of men who don't want to do anything and couldn't do it if they did."
"Oh! This man is a fine workman. He is an expert machinist—has worked for years in boiler shops—has driven——"
"Why is he out of a job if he is such a universal paragon? Does he drink? Remember, we can't take in men who drink—a bucket of beer cost us twelve thousand dollars last year, not to mention the loss of two lives."
"He is as sober as a judge," declared his daughter, solemnly.
"What is it then?—Loafer?"