Blind Author:Ernest Poole Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III I Am finding that this book of mine, a crowded, restless narrative, is to turn this way and that, its personal figures seized upon by influences f... more »rom outside, its story often left on the road while it wanders into enormous fields of life for certain memories which in my present state of mind take hold upon my interest. So in this chapter it will be. Down into "the slums" to live for a year. There was "punch" to that. I was twenty-one. What did I know of poverty? My newspaper work had given me only glamorous glimpses of that long tedious desperate drama which is entitled "Being Poor." But even in those callow days, I did not go down to the poor to "uplift" them; I went for what I considered then a perfectly good and legitimate reason—to dig stories out of their lives. And if those stories and those lives could make me any wiser to the truth about the town, I was quite ready to be shown. Vaguely I had heard about the socialists and anarchists. A little exploration now into something dark and grim, but tense and fascinating, too. Not to be discouraged by the tall bare tenement buildings, stinking streets and dirty crowds, every hour I could spare I spent in exploring the neighborhood where Steve was to do his work; and toward the end of August I found a promising place for our home. Our rooms looked on a little square which extended down to the river front, to a ferry house with wharves on each side, steamers, tugs and barges, fishing schooners and "deep water" sailing craft—the last of their kind—their greatbowsprits reaching in over the street. Here were little restaurants, shops, saloons and brothels. At night weird cries and songs were heard, and sometimes a shot rang out. High over all reared the dark sweeping arch of the Bridge against the stars. In the ten...« less