lunch of bread and dried herring and weak tea in the home of the
shoe-maker's wife, and might have still been busy with his job of
stirring up dissension in the First Apostolic Church, otherwise
known as the Holy Rollers, and of getting the Rev. Gamaliel Lunk
turned out, and Shoemaker Smithers established at the job of pastor,
with Peter Gudge as his right hand man.

Always it had been like that, thru Peter's twenty years of life.
Time after time he would get his feeble clutch fixed upon the ladder
of prosperity, and then something would happen--some wretched thing
like the stealing of a fried doughnut--to pry him loose and tumble
him down again into the pit of misery.

So Peter walked along, with his belt drawn tight, and his restless
blue eyes wandering here and there, looking for a place to get a
meal. There were jobs to be had, but they were hard jobs, and Peter
wanted an easy one. There are people in this world who live by their
muscles, and others who live by their wits; Peter belonged to the
latter class; and had missed many a meal rather than descend in the
social scale.

Peter looked into the faces of everyone he passed, searching for a
possible opening. Some returned his glance, but never for more than
a second, for they saw an insignificant looking man, undersized,
undernourished, and with one shoulder higher than the other, a weak
chin and mouth, crooked teeth, and a brown moustache too feeble to
hold itself up at the corners. Peters' straw hat had many straws
missing, his second-hand brown suit was become third-hand, and his
shoes were turning over at the sides. In a city where everybody was
"hustling," everybody, as they phrased it, "on the make," why should