I discovered that I lacked words--they didn't pour;
at which, in general discontentment with myself and all things, I
pulled up stakes and went to Buffalo. Only, this time I rode in a
railway train, with money in my pocket.
For all that, Buffalo received me with no more circumstance than
it had done when I came there penniless, on the way to the war,
the year before. I piled boards in a lumber-yard until I picked a
quarrel with a tyrant foreman on behalf of a lot of green Germans
whom he maltreated most shamefully. Then I was put out. A
cabinet-maker in the "Beehive," a factory building out in Niagara
Street, hired me next to make bedsteads, and took me to board with
him. In the top story of the factory we fitted up a bedroom that
was just large enough for one sitting and two standing, so long
as the door was not opened; then one of the two had to get out.
It mattered little, for the only visitor I had was a half-elderly
countryman of mine whom they had worked so hard in his childhood
that he had never had a chance to go to school. We two labored
together by my little lamp, and it was great fun to see him who had
never known how to read and write his own Danish make long strides
in the strange tongue he spoke so singularly well.
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