Adversity

To begin with, it was obvious that he could only stay for a very limited
time at the cheap hotel he went to, and his efforts to find employment
brought him sharp rebuffs. Business men who needed assistance asked him
curt questions about his training and experience, and when he could not
answer satisfactorily promptly got rid of him. Then he tried manual labor
and found employment almost as hard to get. The few dollars he earned at
casual jobs did not pay his board at the hotel where he lived in squalid
discomfort, but matters got worse when he was forced to leave it and take
refuge in a big tenement house, overcrowded with unsavory foreigners from
eastern Europe. New York was then sweltering under a heat wave, and he
came home, tired by heavy toil or sickened by disappointment, to pass
nights of torment in a stifling, foul-smelling room.

He bore it for some weeks and then, when his small stock of money was
melting fast, set off to try his fortune in the manufacturing towns of
Pennsylvania and Ohio. Here he found work was to be had, but the best
paid kind was barred to untrained men by Trade-union rules, and the rest
was done by Poles and Ruthenians, who led a squalid semi-communistic life
in surroundings that revolted him. Still, he could not be fastidious and
took such work as he could get, until one rainy evening when he walked
home dejectedly after several days of enforced idleness. A labor agent's
window caught his eye and he stopped amidst the crowd that jostled him on
the wet sidewalk to read the notices displayed.