Day by day he saw the depletion of his honor. He was not a moralist,
a saint, a sinner. Need sweeps all theories aside; in need's fierce
crucible they are transmuted to concrete realities. Those who have never
known what it is to be thrown with Garrison's handicap on the charity
of a great city will not understand. But those who have ever tasted the
bitter crust of adversity will. And it is the old blatant advice from
the Seats of the Mighty: "Get a job." The old answer from the hopeless
undercurrent: "How?"

There came a day when the question of honesty or dishonesty was put up
to Garrison in a way he had not foreseen. The line was drawn distinctly;
there was no easy slipping over it by degrees, unnoticed.

The toilet facilities of municipal lodging-houses are severely crude and
primitive. For the sake of sanitation, the whilom lodger's clothes are
put in a net and fumigated in a germ-destroying temperature. The men
congregate together in one long room, in various stages of pre-Adamite
costumes, and the shower is turned upon them in numerical rotation.

This public washing was one of the many drawbacks to public charity
which Garrison shivered at. As the warm weather set in he accordingly
took full advantage of the free baths at the Battery. On his second
day's dip, as he was leaving, a man whom he had noticed intently
scanning the bathers tapped him on the arm.

He was shaped like an olive, with a pair of shrewd gray eyes, and a
clever, clean-shaven mouth. He was well-dressed, and was continually
probing with a quill tooth-pick at his gold-filled front teeth,
evidently desirous of excavating some of the precious metal.