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I knew that my servants were beginning to draw long faces, and it was amazing the hole they made in my stock of provisions. In fact, as I afterward surmised, each servant was stealing from me and secreting a private stock of provisions for himself. But with the formation of the bread-lines came new troubles.

"He who decries created work, municipal lodging-houses, bread-lines, or even sentimental charity, in the face of the winter's destitution, has an unsocial soul. The most despicable thing to-day is the whine of our cities lest their inadequate catering to their own homeless draw a few vagrants from afar.

One result of these meetings, however, was that General Folsom was persuaded into taking military possession of the wholesale houses and of all the flour, grain, and food warehouses. It was high time, for suffering was becoming acute in the homes of the rich, and bread-lines were necessary.

I asked the men to look him over and see if they had ever seen him before. Now the Bowery men are sharp, and over seventy-five hands went up. They had seen him somewhere, in Mission bread-lines and different places. The Count spoke for about five minutes and then sat down. He sailed on the following Tuesday and I never met him again. He may be in London for all I know, studying up something else.

For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and in so doing imperils my life. There are not enough soup-kitchens and bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their purses they usually die, and die miserably unless they are able to fill their purses pretty speedily." "But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your purse."

He had worked in wood-yards for charity organizations; had given himself up and gone to the Island; stood in bread-lines; in fact, he had done everything the tramp does when he is "down and out." I took quite a fancy to him. He took me up to his room in Eighteenth Street, showed me his credentials, and we became quite chummy.

How were the soldiers to distinguish between a shabby middle-class man, a member of the I.L.W., or a slum dweller? The first and the last had to be fed, but the soldiers did not know all the I.L.W. men in the city, much less the wives and sons and daughters of the I.L.W. men. The employers helping, a few of the known union men were flung out of the bread-lines; but that amounted to nothing.

There was only so much of a food reserve in San Francisco, and at the best it could not last long. Organized labour, we knew, had its private supplies; nevertheless, the whole working class joined the bread-lines. As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken possession of diminished with perilous rapidity.

The volunteers were paid their expenses; the rest of their reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," as a Belgian said who was learning a little American slang. They talked about canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the Erie Canal for years; they spoke of "my province" and compared bread-lines and the efficiency of local officials.

Every day Kedzie's mail contained circulars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines in every nation at war. There were hellish chronicles of Armenian women and children driven like cattle from desert to desert, outraged and flogged and starved by the thousand. The imagination gave up the task.