The Man Who Lost Himself: An Enforced Experiment in Labor

I

SOMETIME in the dark hours of an early morning in November, 1913, I awoke to the realization that I was on a train, without the least understanding as to where I was going, what I was there for, or who I was. A bewildered search in my pockets brought forth letters that told me my name and revealed further that I had been — and probably still was — an assistant professor in Teachers’ College, Columbia University. A letter from Ohio State University seemed to indicate that I was favorably considering the offer of a chair in that institution, but whether I had accepted it I had no means of knowing. Another letter told me that I had been asked by a publisher to give an opinion as to the merits of a manuscript — a history textbook. But none of these availed to bring to my mind a single face, name, or incident that would give me a clue to work on.

Of those hours of dizzy effort and confusion I have little recollection. So far as I can remember now, my feelings were of bewilderment and exasperation rather than of acute distress. It was easy enough to find out that my train was bound for Detroit, and I spent some little time in trying to solve the problem why I should be going to Detroit. But the whole matter remained an absolute blank. I found that the effort to pierce the cloud was not only fruitless, but irritating, like straining your eyes in black darkness to see something, or vainly trying to remember what you were doing Wednesday afternoon three weeks ago. So I made a conscious effort to dismiss the puzzle for the time being, and to look as squarely as I could at the immediate situation.

Before I reached Detroit I had come to a definite decision, aided by a few casual inquiries of a fellow passenger who had, of course, no suspicion of my dilemma. I would take the elect ric car to Toledo, provide myself there with a few necessaries, and set out on foot, trusting to the open road to clear my mind, and putting aside meanwhile all thought as to either the past or the future. For I had a reasonably wellfilled pocket book; how much money was in it I do not know now and may not have known then, but it was enough for any immediate needs.

That night I slept at a little hotel about nine miles out of Toledo. The walk had done me good, though the blank in my memory was as stubborn as ever. During the next ten days I tramped on — walking about twenty miles each day and sleeping at village hotels or farmhouses. One negative clue as to my past was soon evident. My ignorance as to farming was abysmal. Even hitching up a team seemed a performance as intricate as a problem in higher mathematics, and each time that I saw it done I had to stand by and watch in helpless wonderment as buckles and straps were adjusted with a skill that fascinated me. To my regret I had to recognize that farming was to me an unprobed mystery, and had a humiliating feeling that I must have been a narrowly academic person whose knowledge was limited to books.

For the first day or two out of Toledo my mind would turn ever and anon to anxious groping. But this soon ceased, and I began to feel a sort of shrinking horror of the unknown world from which I seemed separated by an impenetrable wall. This is a matter on which I dislike to dwell, and yet it must be stated. Neither then nor later, though I knew both my name and my college, did I take any steps to communicate with my friends. The fact is that it did not at first occur to me, and that when the thought did come I dismissed it with a shudder. No one who has not experienced the like can realize how utterly non-existent my past life seemed in all its personal relationships; how, while my mind recognized that there had been a past, yet it seemed not really mine, insubstantial, dark, unreal, a past of which I knew less than of the life of Oliver Cromwell, and that solely by documentary evidence. Even later on, when I could survey the whole matter in a rational way, I still had the same shrinking from putting forth my own hand to part the curtain. In so far as I ever formulated it, my reason for inaction was a reluctance to leave behind the vivid, healthy life I was leading and return to a circle to which I should have to readjust myself, — a thing which seemed of dizzy complexity, full of embarrassment and even distress, — and in which I should be regarded as abnormal, a semi-invalid. But the strength of my feeling was not to be expressed by any such formulation, and I can only state it, without being able wholly to account for it.

The effort to ascertain the extent and limitations of my own powers was a different matter, rather interesting than otherwise, and even exciting. Things practical, mechanical, or commercial woke no response in my mind. But I found myself at home at once when I picked up a book, and I spent many an hour in testing my memory. I remember repeating the Rime of the Ancient Mariner triumphantly from beginning to end, and planning a lecture on the French Revolution without finding myself at a loss for any essential name or date. I found too that I could recall clearly—to take specific cases — the general appearance of Columbia University, the view from Morningside Heights over Harlem, the Bay of Naples, the Piazza San Marco at Venice. Of the Acropolis of Athens I was not quite so sure. It seemed fairly vivid and I could place the buildings quite easily, but it did not seem so real to me as St. Mark’s or Columbia. Since then I have found the reason for this: I had never been in Athens, and knew the Acropolis only from books, maps, and pictures. But all these places, while objectively clear, were without any personal relation to myself. I remembered them but I did not remember seeing them.

I was aware, of course, of what had happened. My knowledge of physiological psychology was of the slightest, but in general I knew what amnesia is, and realized that a minute cell or group of cells had suffered paralysis. But I became increasingly certain that the trouble was very definitely localized, and that my mind remained perfectly clear and sane. Just as one knows how to read without being able to recall one’s first lessons, so I had the fruits of past years without being able to remember how I had acquired them. My relief at my growing consciousness of mental health was intense — so intense that the problem with which I was faced, appalling as it would have seemed to my friends had they been aware of it, appeared a mere trifle.

So that tramp from Toledo to Danville was not entirely an unhappy one. I was troubled, of course, but the shock itself may have had some numbing effect, and in any case the very loss of my personal past meant that I had no emotion in regard to it. It was not like a conscious exile, when every memory, every association means acute pain. To me all that I was leaving behind was as if it had never been. I was conscious only of the present, of the sweetness of the tonic autumn air, the brown of the fields, the restful silence of the woods. And each noon as I sat by the roadside to eat my lunch and smoke my pipe, I found it possible to look at the world with a serene eye and sweep the devils of doubt and fear behind me.

It may be that I was carried t hrough those first days by the same kind of nervous excitement and insensibility to anxiety and fear that carries a man through a fierce battle. And by the time that this had worn off, the days of silent, lonely tramping along the Ohio and Indiana roads had brought me many steps toward a working adjustment: for the very silence and loneliness had had a steadying, sobering, soothing, and healing effect. What the future held for me I knew not at all, and yet the ignorance brought no real worry. When the rain and the muddy roads of Illinois drove me to take a train, and when I decided to go to Colorado, I was still without any definite plans. I felt only that I must go far from the scenes of my old unknown life, and somehow I yearned for the mountains.

II

It was mid-December when I reached Colorado Springs. The place looked homelike, and the great line of snowy giants to the west seemed to have an inspiring and helpful message. I remember repeating to myself the first verse of the 121st Psalm, a verse that will always have a peculiar depth and meaning to me that it can have for few others. So I cast anchor, not knowing that I was to spend more than two years under the shadow of Pike’s Peak. I knew that I should have to form some plan of action soon, for my funds were now perilously low. But for a little time I let even the immediate future take care of itself, and sought mental and physical tonic in long walks through the lovely mountain country. Cliffs and cañons, the mighty hills on one side and the prairie on the other, these were a solace and a strength beyond imagining. My companions were the magpies and long-crested Rocky Mountain jays. And I remember the thrill with which I saw my first eagle sail out from behind a great crag at the entrance to Cheyenne Cañon, sweep over me in a lordly circle, and disappear between two spires of granite. But, except for the wild things, I wanted solitude. I spent that Christmas, I remember, in the Garden of the Gods, and my Christmas dinner consisted of a sandwich and a banana.

The time came, how ever, when I had to face facts. Somehow or other I had to earn my living or go hungry. Query: how was I to go about it? One part of the answer was obvious at once. It was inevitable that if I were to persist in clinging to the vivid life that I knew and turning away from the dark life that was hidden, I must accept the consequences in their entirety. I could not be a teacher, for to be a teacher requires records and references of a kind that I was conspicuously without. In the face of this, since I was a man of one trade, the only thing left to me was unskilled labor. Even unskilled labor looked formidable to me, for, in spite of the adjective, it does involve some degree of skill. As a matter of fact, the most ignorant Mexican in Colorado was better qualified then to earn his living than I. But I had muscles and a willing spirit, and I saw no reason for shrinking from the life of a laborer.

With this acceptance of the inevitable came the reflection that I could at least turn my evil state to some profit. I could face the situation, not with the discouragement and shrinking that benumbs and degrades, but with the determination to take it as an experience that would enable me to see life and its problems from a new angle. With the resolve came, not only courage, but the awakening of a definite intellectual interest. If I could take the whole matter as an adventure, as an experiment in labor and life, then, when my normal self should be restored, I could come back perhaps a little wiser than before. So, in some measure, might I wrest good from evil.

There remained the solving of the practical problem, the getting of a ‘job.’ Lamentable it may be, but true it certainly is, that a mere college professor — perhaps any college-bred and professional man — is likely to be the most helpless of mortals outside his own field. I may be a poor type: many, I know, would be less helpless than I; but still the general fact remains. Make a vow not to touch your own line of work for six months, limit your capital to a few dollars, put aside the magic of friendly influence and ‘pull,’ and see whether the world does not suddenly become a barren and pathless waste, or something very like it. An office-boy, a mechanic, a ranchman might solve the problem fairly easily. His daily work has been in its own way a many-sided practical education. But the training of a college man has taught him how to enjoy the ‘intellectual life,’ how to think more or less clearly about many things, and how to do almost nothing. Even the informative side of his college course has had almost no direct relation to the conduct of life. Weak and futile as our educational system is at so many points, its most notable single defect is its failure to develop initiative or to train in many-sided action, and I was, I fear, a conspicuous example of American education at its worst.

Certainly I felt at a loss, and felt foolish in being at a loss. I found myself marveling at the surpassing wisdom of grocery clerks who had never heard of Descartes and who would have believed you if you had told them that logarithm was the ‘high-brow’ name for a June-bug, but who would weigh you out fifty things without making a mistake of a cent in the price of any of them. I watched scores of men at work in all the infinitely varied activities of the life of even a small city, watched their confident efficiency with growing wonder and respect, and stood in awe before my own appalling incapacity. At last, with humble mind and a vast sense of utter unimportance, I went to an employment office.

The words ‘Employment Agency’ I had doubtless often seen before. If so, the legend had been uninteresting, almost meaningless, having vague associations of a sordid and perhaps even repulsive kind. Far different was the case now. The words held golden possibilities of immunity from hunger. With a valiant assumption of boldness I entered an office. I saw two or three silent men in shabby working clothes, with seamed, brown faces, standing at the rail, and with an effort at nonchalance I turned to a prosperous-looking person in a swivel-chair and asked for a job. Weary, uninterested eyes were turned my way and a pipe was removed long enough to permit the agent to say that there was nothing in sight at present. I backed out apologetically. This performance was repeated for several days. Then I began to wonder how the man in the swivel-chair could pay for his office and his pipe; but I found that the agency was free, maintained by the state, and that this was an off season. Perhaps, I reflected, an independent office might give better results, as its existence depended on its being of some use to the unemployed.

I tried one and stuck to it. The proprietor came to know me and would give me a cheerful smile when I entered with the usual inquiry. We even had pleasant conversations. But I generally found the genial manager reading placidly with his feet on the table, and our conferences invariably began with a regretful ‘Nothing doing.’

Early in the proceedings I had been told that there was ice-work if I wanted it, at Lake George, up in the mountains forty miles away. But ice-work brought visions of pulling two-hundred and-fifty-pound cakes of ice out of the water, swinging them lightly on to a sled or a car, doing it again, and keeping on doing it all day. The thing was obviously out of the question.

Then a brilliant idea occurred to me and I called on the superintendent of the street-car company. I half expected to be thrown out, but though he was a man of few words, those words were kindly enough, and to my amazement he turned to his desk and wrote something on a slip of paper.

‘I can give you work for two days, as it happens,’ he said. ‘ Report at seven to-morrow morning and present this.’

He nodded a courteous dismissal and I left. The paper said that ‘bearer’ was to be put on the track gang, and ‘bearer’ quailed. But I needed the money: it was two dollars a day — a nine-hour day.

I duly reported on time and was told to climb into the work-car. Inside sat and stood a group of men whom I eyed with timidity and respect. All around me were crowbars, picks, shovels, and curious appliances of mysterious purpose. In due season t he car moved out of the barn, and a few blocks down the street six men — of whom I was one — were ordered out with picks and shovels. Our task seemed a simple one, to remove the ice and frozen mud from the rails of a switch. It had been soft the day before and would be again by noon, but in the mean time the night’s frost had made the switch useless. In five minutes my back was breaking in two, but still the thing could be done, and I was able to get through without disgracing myself. Then we climbed into the car again and were taken down to a railroad station, and I had ten minutes’ grace for the straightening of my broken back.

There was a car there loaded with ties. That car had to be unloaded. It had been through several snow-storms and the snow had thawed and frozen again, so that the ties were bound together in a solid mass. Still, we got the things out, toilfully loosening them with the crowbar and throwing them well clear of the car. Then we had to pile them in neat stacks, shovel a carload of sand, attend to some odds and ends, and go back to the inevitable ties to dip them in a vat of creosote. So it went on until five o’clock, and I wended my way stiffly to my room, proudly conscious that I had earned two dollars, a goodly balm for aching muscles. The next day we shoveled icy snow into a flat car, clearing a track out toward Cheyenne Cañon — shoveled and picked until I could hardly lift the heavy tools.

The labor was hard and much of it was not particularly interesting. But the men and their outlook on life interested me immensely. It was my first contact with what is called unskilled labor. That the men’s muscles seemed made of steel, their backs unbreakable, was to be expected. It was hard to believe that mine would become so, but still I knew that a week or a month would make any man, certainly any healthy man, into a good working machine. It was not their efficiency as workmen that interested me so much as their amazing good-nature, their unbroken cheerfulness. As an undoubted tenderfoot I had expected an impatient scorn of my clumsiness, a certain amount of rough ill-nature. What I received was the exact opposite. Even when I occasionally let a tie slip into the hot creosote and caused a splash that was not without danger to the eyes of my companions, they only showed me how to get a better grip on my pike, or assured me that such things might happen with any one of them. Their language to one another was rough, sometimes appalling to my unaccustomed ears; but this was only a way they had; it meant nothing; and if their conversation was profane and gross, it was never ill-natured, never mean, and rarely even bad in any real sense, as showing evil dispositions or habits. I found my estimate of my fellow laborers rising steadily every hour that I worked with them.

Those two days gave me my labor baptism. Never again would I be able to look upon a laborer as other than a man and a brother. The conventional ‘class’ superiority, the advantage given by education, sank quite into the background as I worked with these men and observed their unpretentious strength, efficiency, cheerful comradeship, and manliness. I was to work with many more of their kind, but I never saw occasion to alter the first impression of the American unskilled laborer that was given me by my companions of two days in the track gang of the Colorado Springs Street Railway.

I have been asked since whether I did not feel strongly my ‘intellectual superiority.’ The answer is easy. I did not. Quite the contrary. It is true that, as I worked and used my eyes and ears, I could reflect on my experience, could ponder with a new interest Plato’s conception of andreia and its place in his theory of education; but it was with no arrogant consciousness that I alone of the company knew anything about Plato or had ever heard of andreia. My thought was rather that these men and others like them were living what I had read about and thought of in my study; for I took no pride in my ever-growing conviction that I had never before done things with my hands or tried to solve a concrete practical problem.

I am quite aware that there is another side to the matter, that there are other and entirely pertinent comments to be made. But at the same time intellectual superciliousness becomes impossible when you actually don your overalls and pigskin gloves and work with laborers as one of them.

One of them, yes, but a raw apprentice I surely was, the greenest of freshmen in a new school—stiff and sore after two days’ work, black and blue over each hip where I had supported my end of the heavy ties, and hardly able to roll out of bed the next morning. Let on the whole I was far from disheartened. The first plunge had been distinctly invigorating, and Lake George now seemed worthy of some inquiry and consideration. It was apparently the only work available, and besides, my curiosity was awakened by the attitude of man after man who came into the employment office to seek work. Often when I was there a laborer would come in, receive the usual answer to his inquiry, ‘Nothing doing except the ice-work at Lake George,’ shake his head disgustedly, and go out. Most of them were huskylooking men, and I could not see why they should turn down a job if they really wanted work. I asked one of them what the trouble was, and his answer was explicit, even if not wholly satisfactory.

‘Aw, it’s too cold up there, and they don’t pay you nothing. Anyway I’m not going to sleep in no crummy bunkhouse for nobody.’

True, it would be cold. The pay was $1.75 for a ten-hour day, from which seventy-five cents (six bits, in the language of the country) would have to be deducted for meals. That would make it a dollar a day clear — not a princely income, but much better than nothing. The company would advance transportation and take it out of wages. And my friend the employment agent told me that, so far as he could learn, the work would not be as heavy as on the track gang. On the whole it seemed worth trying.

III

The track-work had been a preface. As I journeyed up the Ute Pass and over the Divide by the Colorado Midland, as I disembarked at a little mountain station in the midst of a wilderness of granite and snow; as the train roared off round a bend and disappeared in the great jaws of a cañon, I realized that a new chapter was beginning for me. The time of doubt, of waiting, and of wondering was over, and until new light came to guide me, I was to earn my living by the work of my hands. Yet in the glorious light and eager air of that clear winter day, it was impossible to believe that, because back and arms might be busy, the brain must needs rust in idleness. The Rockies and the day’s work together might surely teach lessons not to be scorned. And as I shouldered my pack and trudged off along the trail leading to the lake, I tried to leave behind me ‘the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world,’ and to draw from the friendly hills a message of hope.

Looking back now over the two years that followed, crowded as they were with experiences that taught me much about the life of the laborers, there stand out vividly moments that threw flashes of light on my own past. For, eager as I was to learn from my fellow workers, I never forgot that I had still to find myself, and hardly a day passed that did not suggest or confirm some impression, round out or explain some desire or conviction. And some discoveries were peculiarly illuminating.

One of the ineffaceable memories is of our bunk-house at Lake George. It was a long, flimsily built hut, furnished with a few chairs, a little table, a stove that we kept going with coal purloined from the engine-room, and bunks for ten men. We had two candles that we paid for ourselves, taking turns in the disbursement of the necessary nickel.

I well remember how it looked on my first evening, as I sat comfortably propped against my pack and considered my companions. Four of the boys were playing cards by candle-light, another was placidly reading a magazine in his bunk, two others farther away from the light were exchanging curious views about the boss and his Spiritualism (said boss being a fervid Spiritualist), and two were toasting their feet by the stove, which was red-hot with the fiercely burning lignite. It puzzled me to tell wherein they differed from a group of the more prosperous type except in their appearance. It may be that they were less intelligent and more ignorant, but I doubted it then and doubt it still. The faces lit by the candle at the card-table were young and comely, the flicker of the tiny flame was reflected in eyes bright with the joy of living, animated, alert, anything but dull, brutal, or stupid. Irresponsible, no doubt, and lacking in the finer graces, but perhaps no more so than many men of more elegant veneering.

Certainly they were not without virtues, and I remember them gratefully. Here was I, a green tenderfoot, and by all the rules of the conventional story they ought to have walked all over me. But, like my associates of the track gang, they were without exception generous and good-natured: they willingly showed me the tricks of the work, helped me when I was faced with something that I could not quite handle, showed no impatience or snobbishness in their obvious superiority.

There was one particularly curious thing. The language they used with one another was amazingly lurid and unsavory. They hurled epithets and insults at one another — all in absolute good-nature—which seemed to stain the very soul of a listener. Yet because I did not do it, they sent nothing of that sort in my direction. It was a strange thing in its way and was most unexpected. It was evidently quite unconscious, and they did not treat me as an outsider in any other way. It was just a sign of innate decency.

But the very novelty of their language and of the things that interested them brought home to me the realization that mine must have been a quiet and ‘protected’ life, free alike from the evil stains of the work-a-day world and from its firm grip on reality. Their grossness seemed singularly unimportant beside their virility. I felt that I could never again be quite ‘academic,’ indifferent to the immense toil of the millions, and I had moments of scorn for the man I might have been a year before. Perhaps I did my old self an injustice; but little as I admired the irresponsibility or the ‘ vulgarity ’ of my mates at Lake George, the light they threw by contrast on my own past gave me a sense of shame rather than of superiority.

My next job was that of man-of-allwork in a Sisters of Mercy sanatorium in Manitou, and it too gave me its contribution to my knowledge of myself — this time a pleasant one. One of my daily tasks took me into a building that was not used for patients in the winter, and I found there a piano. Straightway came a joyous realization, and thereafter — with the amused consent of the Sisters — I lightened the labors of each day by a half-hour of music. I was far from being a skilled musician, but college songs, hymns, bits of opera, and odds and ends of all kinds came to my mind without any difficulty and without any apparent limit, and again and again the notes that rang through that cold, half-lit corridor seemed on the verge of unlocking the closed door in my brain. The verge was never passed, but my pleasant memories of Sister Clare, Sister Celestine, and Sister Elizabeth are joined, not so much with the recollection of the fires I had to light in the frozen hours before dawn, as with the goodly harmonies that I summoned from that dusty old piano.

The early summer found me in a little cabin, living as simple a life as ever Thoreau did by Walden pond, earning enough for my few needs by spading gardens, cutting grass, and doing odd jobs of any kind that came along. Anon would come stormy days, when outdoor work was impossible, and then I could read to my heart’s content. For the kindly lady who owned my little abode, and to whom I paid rent in terms of lawn-mowing and gardening, told me of the conditions on which I could use the Colorado Springs Library. It was only a few miles distant, an easy walk, and I could bring home all the books I could carry. For the library authorities fortunately had a theory that the books were there for use; and apart from restrictions as to fiction, they allowed one to take practically an unlimited number of books. So I would browse luxuriously among the stacks, select about five of varied content, and bear them triumphantly to my little home by Cheyenne Creek.

It did not take long to pick up all the main threads of my intellectual life. At first, no doubt, the shock of having a person in flannel shirt and toil-worn clothes select volumes of Maeterlinck, Plato, and the Cambridge Modern History may have puzzled the library assistants. But t hey grew used to my tastes and became my good friends. The library was an excellent one, well equipped in precisely the things that I most needed, and it is one of the golden memories of my time in Colorado.

So in due time I found myself. Not in one sense, indeed. My memory was not restored. But I had picked up all the threads of life that were not purely personal, and had adjusted myself to the main facts of the situation. I quite believed that my life as a laborer was only temporary, that sooner or later the dormant brain-cells would awake. Once, as I passed the reference shelves, I opened Who’s Who in an impulse of curiosity, and read with mingled feelings the essential facts of my biography. To see my real name and record — brought up to 1910, no further — made my heart beat with disturbing violence, and I was a little dizzy as I replaced the book. But it affected not at all my resolution not to disclose my identity until I felt that the cure was at least wall begun.

By March, 1916, more than two years since the blow had fallen, I had been receiving clerk and dish-washer, gardener and dining-room man, utility man in a moving-picture company, and night clerk in a hotel. I had worked in various ways on three ranches and — in the service of Romaine Fielding, the ‘movie’ star — in that wonderful corner of the Garden of the Gods, Glen Eyrie. Naturally, too, I had made many friends, notably a little Russian Jew tailor, — known to his friends as ‘Jake,’ — with an inimitable power of narrative, a fresh, illuminating attitude toward life as he saw it, and a heart of gold; another Russian Jew — a prosperous merchant whose light for life in a strange country had left him still a dreamer, a seeker for light, and whose direct, powerful mind made my hours with him stimulating beyond estimate, so wisely could he interpret experiences utterly unlike anything I knew; and a Michigan man, once a medical student at Ann Arbor, who became my chum. He was an exile of fate, a victim of tuberculosis, and like so many others, he was neither an invalid nor a sound man. A common interest in chess had first brought us together, and we drifted into intimacy. He and his wife became as brother and sister to me, and in between my jobs I made their little cottage my home, splitting the expenses and sharing the work.

To him I told my secret. And one day, as we wore doing some housecleaning, there came the first clear rift in the clouds. Shortly before, I had brought home from the library Professor E. L. Thorndike’s Educational Psychology. My friend had noticed the name on the title-page and had commented on the fact that Professor Thorndike, being on the faculty of Teachers’ College, had possibly been a friend of mine. I had assented without giving any particular thought to the matter. But on the day in question I happened to be on my knees in the kitchen, manfully scrubbing the floor while he followed me up with the mop. As I unbent my back to gaze with pride on my handiwork, he remarked with a sudden laugh that it would be funny if my friend Thorndike — in his imagination a severe, academic, fastidious person, no doubt — could see me at that moment. It was a purely accidental remark, but as if he had turned on an electric switch, the personality of Thorndike flashed into my mind — his face, his form, his speech and manner, all as I had known him in the lectureroom or in the Faculty Club back at Teachers’ College.

I sat up amazed and told my friend what had happened. Scrubbing-brush and mop in hand, we discussed the matter excitedly, both agreeing that this was the beginning of recovery.

Only a week later a friend of mine on the police force of Colorado Springs came across a portrait of me that had been published at the time of my disappearance. Identification followed, and with it my return to the east and the rapid and complete restoration of mental health. So at the end I was able to look back on two lives, one the quiet, normal, uneventful life of a student and one the life of a laborer, an exile cast adrift in a strange world to sink or swim, and withal to learn new and undreamed-of lessons in a graduate school of sociology unendowed by any millionaire, controlled by no faculty, but ruled by iron requirements and grim penalties. They were lessons paid for by others at a bitter price. Yet something was learned, and the wisdom may remain when the bitterness has passed away.