He was a great creature, of much bone and brawn, and being hungry was
something he could not endure. He thought--how far back it seemed--of
the farmers' dinners, and the turkey and ruffed grouse and woodcock.
Woodcock! Why, his whole two dollars and fifty cents would not feed
him for a single time upon that glorious bird! He looked through the
fine restaurant windows, and it amused him. His own meals were taken
in restaurants of a poorer class. With thirty-five cents and a
fraction to live upon for a day, one does not care for game.

Harlson's dress became of the shabby genteel order. The binding upon
coat and vest had begun to show that little wound which is not wide nor
deep, but is past the healing, and the shininess at knees and elbows
reflected the light that never was on land or sea, or, at least, ought
not to be. He felt a degradation with it all, though it was with him
the result of folly, not of fault, and he made a struggle for reform in
his finances. He abandoned the cheap room in which he lived, and slept
upon the office floor at night, the place in decent weather being
moderately warm.

The individual from China and the individual from more than one other
land, who comes to live with us, can exist on thirty-five cents a day
and think his provender the fat of the land. But he is not a great
meat-eater. The fiber of him is not our own. His style of tissue was
not fixed in northern bay and fjord and English and Norman forests, and
his ancestors transmitted to him a self-denying stomach. He can live
in the city upon thirty-five cents a day, and clasp his hands across
his abdomen and say, with the thankful, "I have dined." Not so the man
of Harlson's type, and of his size. The sum of two dollars and fifty
cents, the young man found, would not feed and clothe him for a week.
He was a boy still, in the freshness of his appetite, yet his demands