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I came to Penny's Pit, high in the Dry Belt of British Columbia, where I met them, simply because I was young and wanted to see the West, and did not want to see it only from a car window. I was not, in the accepted sense, an immigrant. I was not a "prospective settler." I was just a wanderer, curiously looking at the world and encountering men I could never have met in my decorous home. As I had no trade, when I had to replenish my pocketbook (being also not a remittance man) I had to join the ranks of the unskilled laborers. Many mixed accents have I heard when employed upon unskilled labor in the old West, that of the born navvy on one side of me and of an English public school on the other, for in an English public school they do not teach any trades.

A young man who would not go to a city and get a job indoors, yet without a trade and without money, and needing some to have for use when I wandered on further, I took the job at Penny's Pit because it was in the open air, and because I wanted money to buy undervests and socks, and to pay my way somewhere else, and for my food when looking at that somewhere else, wherever it might be. Also, I was entirely pleased to be at Penny's Pit itself for a spell, so as to see Penny's Pit, so as to know it instead of just having a glimpse of it in passing by. That explains me at Penny's Pit.