A FRIEND who owns a small hotel phoned me asking for the privilege of bringing a man who was stopping with her to see me, and who, she claimed, needed help very badly. After she had explained his case to some extent, I told her I could see him the next morning.

She came with him at the appointed time, and after introducing him left us alone. He was a fine, intelligent looking man, quite neatly dressed, about thirty-five years old, six feet tall and weighing all of two hundred pounds. After he was seated I asked him to tell me all about himself and his problem.

It was an interesting story and not wholly unusual or different from many I had heard. He had come in his own car from a town in Texas with his family—a wife and two little girls. They had gotten as far as Cincinnati, Ohio, on the funds he had left; but from there he was helped from town to town by the Relief Organizations who sent him to Salvation Army or Volunteers of America Barracks or small hotels, where often they had to sleep in a large room with all kinds of derelicts, and under such foul conditions that they often preferred to sit and sleep as they could in their car.

Of course I did much questioning, and brought out the following principal facts: He had been quite prosperous up to 1930, had built up a nice business as the representative of an Eastern Refrigerator Concern and earning from $500 to $700 a month, and saving much of it. But when the financial crisis struck the East, his Refrigerator Concern—the chief source of his business—failed, and later other houses he represented; and gradually business dropped away until he was not making expenses.

Ordinarily optimistic, he would not acknowledge defeat, and managed to keep going by trying all kinds of things. Finally, however, as conditions all around him got worse he began to grow discouraged and in time as with many others could see no ray of hope, as everything he tried seemed to peter out with no apparent future ahead of him.