One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper, and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given. In every case I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring photographs. I was offered employment in each instance. The conditions were as uniform as those governing a regular market. Two dollars was the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process. One dollar would purchase the needed materials.
There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until spring. “Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was the conventional explanation. “You can soon learn to color ten or twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three dollars a dozen for them.” The discovery that I had no money invariably brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled suddenly. I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as a type.
We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby of a lodging-house. Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room. My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence. He was three days beyond the end of his resources. So far he had been fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house. But on that evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging. It loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it. It was of this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.
Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the summers.