Letter V’s, Just Large Enough to Fit Behind the Lapels of the Vest.

There were six turns of the circle for six patterns on one side, and then, by merely turning the whole thing around, the other six effects were possible. The only trouble was, I did not wear a vest in the mill, and so could only use it to and from the mill, to the theater, where I changed it during every act, and took care that others should notice the magic transformation. I wore it to a Sunday-school that I attended intermittently, and astonished my classmates by six transformations during the hour’s session!

Then I began to contrast my own hair with Mallet’s black and orderly curls. His hair always shone, and the barber kept it from growing down below the ear! That disturbed me, for neither comb nor brush could part mine or make it stay down. I was so disturbed over the matter that I confided in my aunt. She laughed, and said that she had a recipe that would satisfy me. She sent me down to a butcher shop for a large-sized marrow bone. Then she had me produce my large-sized bottle of Jockey Club. After boiling the marrow bone in water for two hours, she made me extract the marrow. Then I had to put in a certain amount of perfume and give the whole a good stirring. Aunt next produced a cold-cream jar, and put the decoction in and let it cool over night.

In the morning she said, “Now, Al, that’s a jar of the best hair grease you could buy for money anywhere. It’s an old recipe and will not only make the hair stay in place but is, at the same time, good for it. It makes the hair grow, and keeps it in good condition.” True enough it had a good odor to it, and was smooth like the stuff the barber put on my head when he cut my hair. I rubbed some on my head that morning, and not only did I have the satisfaction of seeing my hair shine, like Mallet’s, but it also stayed parted in the middle! I went to the mill that morning, with my cap balanced on the back of my head, so that everybody could see the shine and the parting. But I had not been in the mill long before the pomade evaporated, my hair sprang loose, and I was as badly off as before. By bringing the jar into the mill I managed to remedy that, and got along very well until one of the doffers rubbed his palm over my head, discovered the grease, sniffed it, and told all over the room that I was daubing bear’s grease on my hair to keep it down.

These items of self-consciousness, so momentous to me at the time, were some of the signs of adolescence. I was growing very rapidly, and my whole self was in a whirl of change. Every bone seemed to have sprung loose, every muscle seemed to be expanding at once, all my strength seemed to have left my body! My bones were sore and every muscle ached. An infinite weariness and dizziness took possession of me, day and night. Sitting or standing I could find no rest. When I bent down, I suffered undue pain; when I reached for anything, I had to drop my arms before I had attained the object. I suffered as if jackscrews had been laid at all angles in my body, and were being turned and turned day and night without any stop. I could not bend and reach under the frames to clean them without excruciating pain sweeping over me, and a cold sweat. If I took hold of a broom, and tried to sweep, I had to drag the broom wearily after the first few moments. I went home after the day’s work as tired as if I had been holding up the world all day. And though I went to bed soon after supper, and slept soundly till the morning, I awoke as tired as if I had been toiling at a slave’s task every minute of the night.

I tried, in no complaining spirit, to describe my feelings to my aunt. “Why, they’re nothing but growing pains, Al,” she said. “You ought to feel proud that you’re going to be a tall man. It’ll pass. You must get all the rest you can by going to bed right after supper. That’ll help!”

But she never said, as I wanted her to say, “Get off from work while you’re suffering so, and don’t try to work while you’re in that condition.”

During this period, I grew to be supersensitive and self-conscious. I had a high, shrill voice, of which I was not aware till a doffer mimicked it one day. It was a small matter to him, but to me it was tragical. It wore on my imagination all through that day, it haunted me that night, it intruded itself on my solitude until I inwardly cried and grew depressed.

“What’s ailing you, lad?” commented my uncle the next morning. “You look as if you’d lost your best friend?” But I would not unburden myself of the load of guilty feeling that was on my shoulders--guilt, because my voice was high, shrill, and childish! I was afraid to meet people whom I knew on the street, and when I saw one I knew coming towards me, I would dash to the opposite side, or, if escape like that were impossible, I would turn towards a shop-window or pretend to be interested in a bit of dirt on a curbstone.

Mark Waterhouse, an old crippled Englishman, who ran the elevator and with whom I talked often while in the elevator room, seemed to understand me thoroughly when I told him how I felt.

“Aye, lad,” he said, “it’s growing tha’ art. Growing swift, too: tall like a bullrush. It’s bad for thee to be in this ’ot room an’ working. Tha’ needs fresh hair; lots on’t. Lots o’ fresh hair to get in th’ blood an’ bone, like.”

“But aunt won’t let me stay at home,” I said.

“Aye,” grumbled the old man with a slow nod of his head, “they all say it. Th’ll do that. It’s the way o’ th’ mill, lad, an’ we’re born to ’t. You con put a plank ower a rose bush while the shoots’r young an’ growing, and the shoots’ll turn aside, go crook’d, get twisted, but the bush will grow, lad, spite o’ the plank. This work and bad air’s the plank on top o’ ye, but yeu’ll grow, spite on’t. Yeu’ll grow, for God started ye growing an’ ye can’t stop God. But yeu’ll grow bent at’ shoulders, legs’ll twist, feet’ll turn, knees’ll bend in! Sure’s ye live, they will. See me, lad,” he said, “the plank was on top o’ me, too. I went int’ mill at nine, an’ worked ’ard for a babby, I did! Con I walk straight? See me,” and he went at a pathetic hobble across the room, one knee turned in, the other foot twisted out of joint. “That’s t’ way it took me, lad, when I was in your shoes. I’m not t’ only one, either. Th’ mills full on ’em! Do I freighten ye, lad? Never mind. Do your best, spite on’t. I tell ye what! Stretch your arms mony times through t’ day. Oxercise! Oxercise! Stretch thy muscles, thy legs, an’ get all the chance tha con so tha’ll grow spite on’t. Spite o’ work, bad air an’ all! Strengthen thasel’, lad. Don’t let twists, knots, an’ bends coom!”

This old man’s counsel made a deep impression on me. In terror of the things he described, and which he himself was, I made up my mind that I would not let my body get bent, crooked, or distorted, so I did as he said. I stretched myself to my full height many times a day. I exercised with weights and broom handles, even though I found it very painful. I gulped in the fresh air when out of the mill, and walked with my chest thrust out, a stiff, self-conscious, growing lad, fighting ever against the impending tragedy of a deformed body.

Chapter X. “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half” and His Optimistic Whistlers

Chapter X. “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half” and His Optimistic Whistlers

By the middle of the following winter, I had entered fully into all the privileges that were mine by virtue of my labor in the mill. The background of all my privileges was the spending money my aunt gave me. She apportioned me money on a basis which kept me constantly at work. I was given ten cents on every dollar that I brought home. This made me ambitious for advance. It made me keep at work even when I should have been at home on a sick bed. It drove “loafing days” out of my mind entirely, for spending money was the summum bonum of my existence. The kind of things I craved, the only things I found real pleasure in, cost money.

I attended the ten-cent shows in the theater on Saturday afternoons. I looked forward throughout the week to a glass of hot beef-tea at the soda fountain. I would smack my lips long in anticipation of two-for-five cream puffs or a five-cent pork pie. They meant fully as much to me, then, as did the Horse Show or a Paris gown to the aspiring daughter of one of the mill stockholders.

Intermittently, I used to go to the business section of the city alone, and stop at Cheap John’s, the tobacconist’s, for a treat of second-hand novels. There was a squat, gaudily decorated Punch standing in front of Cheap John’s, with a handful of chocolate cigars always extended to the passers-by. Punch’s jester’s cap, with the bells over his left ear, his hooked nose and upturned chin, always with a fixed grin on his shiny face, always seemed a human goblin, saying, “Come in, and have one on me!”

The interior of Cheap John’s was like a country fair Midway. There were weight machines, moving pictures, slot instruments, lung testers, name-plate makers, guessing machines, card-wheels, pool-tables, racing bulletins, sport scores, displays of sporting apparatus, of tobacco specialties, of colored sporting posters, hat-cleaning wheels, clothes-cleaning tables, shoe-blacking alcoves, and a long counter on which were heaped rows on rows of highly colored, second-hand Wild West, Sport, Adventure, and Detective romances: a bundle of them for ten cents! A bundle of these I would purchase, listen to the men’s voices that came from the dense clouds of smoke, and then I would race home, a distance of a mile, to examine more closely the prizes of the night.

The next day being Sunday, I had the privilege of staying in bed, of having my breakfast brought to me, much as if I had been a convalescent gentleman. My aunt would find me propped up in bed, with the novels spread over the bed; and in the midst of a detective romance, always read first, I would be interrupted by some such words as these: “Well, his royal highness! Will he have bacon and eggs and a hot cup of cocoa?” I would merely keep on reading, with a suppressed, growled “Yep!” and after breakfast, though it would be a pleasant day outside, I would sit there in bed and read until I became satiated with thrills, disguised scouts, burgled safes, triumphant, last-chapter endings of “Justice at last!” reunited lovers and pardoning fathers, when I would dress, have dinner, and go out into a slumberous Sabbath afternoon, to stand bored on a street corner until dark, when the gangs of the city moved and planned exciting escapades.

When my uncle saw me reading the novels, he interposed with, “That’s cheap stuff, Al, and will never make you any better. You want to read refining things, the great books. There’s many an exciting one that is exciting without being cheap. I wish you would let me plan for you.” I told him that I would--sometime, but I kept on reading Cheap John’s bargain-counter literature.

The ten and a half hours in the mill, with its humdrum rattle, its high-pitched hum, the regularity of its fixtures, the monotonousness of its routine, bullied my nerves into a tamed, cowed state. Day by day, day by day, day by day, at the appointed time, in the instructed way, with the same broom or the same-sized bunch of waste, to do the task! And there wanted to stir in me a schoolboy’s expression of vitality, a growing lad’s satisfaction in novelty! But all through the hours of light, from morning till evening, with the sun arising and departing, I had to listen to, and keep time with, the humming of wheels!

Consequently, when my feet felt the outside world at night or on Saturdays, at the first refreshing feel of the pure air which took that deep-lodged heat from my white cheeks, I always promised myself some exciting pleasure ere the day passed, to stimulate my cowed nerves and make me a boy again.

So I fell heart and soul into the scheme of a group of other boys who worked in the mill and lived near me. It was my first membership in a “gang.” It was presided over by a sturdy young Irishman, who, because he had lost a leg below the knee, was nicknamed, “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half.” Peter worked in the mill, and examined cloth in the weave room. He thrilled our jaded nerves very successfully. We had ghost-play at night on the street, when he would spit fire, make phosphorescent writing on a tenement, lead a line of sheeted figures soberly in review through the night, and close the performance by hurling a battery of bad eggs at us, his admiring audience. Peter was King of the Night. He seemed to have the sight of a cat and the cunning of a fox. He led us at night over high board fences, on the other side of which, in the dark, we would almost choke ourselves against tight clotheslines. He taught us organized play, and, wise gang-leader which he unconsciously was, he changed our adventures and diversions so often that no complaints were made, and night time, with Peter in it, became the thrilling objective during my winter work.

For a short season, in the winter, the whole gang joined the club, which was kept for mill-boys and was supported by the corporation for which I worked. There were work-benches, checker-rooms, a poorly equipped gymnasium, seemingly always in the possession of the adults, and every now and then an entertainment occurred, when some imported entertainer with talent would be invited to come from his or her aristocratic home--with a group of “slummers,” usually and divert us. We thought most of them very tame, resented the manual training department because we thought ten hour’s work sufficient for one day, and got what pleasure we could from the entertainments. One man told us, among other things in a memorable address, to “whistle when you’re happy and whistle when you’re in danger of feeling mad. Whistling gives courage, like yells at a football game. Whistle, boys, whistle. It’s a sign that your courage is good!” That point impressed itself on Peter, too, for when we left the club that night at nine o’clock (to stay on the streets till ten), he lined us up like soldiers in review, and thus addressed us, “Company halt all ready, whistle!” We put our fingers in our mouths and produced a profusion of vibrant whistles, which indicated that we were the most courageous and happy lads in the world. Then Peter, stumping ahead, led us militantly up a street, stooping every now and then under a street lamp to call out, “All the happy ones whistle, you!”

Chapter XI. Esthetic Adventures made possible by a Fifteen-Dollar Piano

Chapter XI. Esthetic Adventures made possible by a Fifteen-Dollar Piano

It was late in that winter that the trading instinct cropped out in my uncle and aunt. They decided to open a candy-store in the tenement where we lived. For this purpose the landlord was persuaded to allow them to use the bow window for display purposes. The parlor was fitted with a small counter, a large store lamp, and a various assortment of sodas, confectionery and pastry.

That was a prohibition year in city politics, and the tenement thirst was pronounced to be “something awful!” Desperate men were compelled to go away on holidays and Saturdays to get what refreshment they could. The police were on keen watch for illegal selling. They were making daily raids in different parts of the city. Liquors had been found in cellars, hidden under the floors, in flasks buried in the bodies of huge codfish, water-pipes had been cut off from the main pipes and tapped to barrels of whisky and beer; every trick possible to the imagination seemed to have been uncovered, yet my aunt undertook to let some chosen throats in the neighborhood know that she planned to keep a supply of intoxicants on hand.

I was asked, at night, to take a pint of whiskey here and there to some shut-in woman like Old Burnt Jane, a cripple from a fire, who always let tears fall in the food she was cooking as she said: “Wait, wait, little boy, dearie. I’ll get my mon-ey when I’ve got this taste of cheese off; wait like a good little boy!”

Our customers, who came for a drink at any time, had a secret sign whereby they could ask for intoxicants without mentioning them by name. On Sundays, our kitchen would be filled with men and women having their thirsts quenched. My Aunt Millie rubbed her hands with satisfaction over the prosperous business she did.

But one Sunday afternoon there came three plain-clothes men to the shop. The alarm had been given, and Aunt Millie waited for the raid with no outward traces of fear. There were some people at the rear of the house, and they were engaged in a very busy, “manufactured” conversation about “Charley’s throat trouble” when the officers came in the back to investigate. If they sniffed the air for traces of whisky, they only got a superabundance of “mint” and “musk,” “lozengers” half thrown into the customers’ mouths by Aunt Millie. A “complete” investigation was made, covering the back-yard, the cellar, the kitchen, the counter, and the bedrooms, but no illegal wares were found, and the officers left the shop in chagrin. As they left, my Aunt Millie bent her fond gaze towards a row of black bottles that stood in a row in the display window, marked, “Ginger,” “Spruce,” and “Birch.”

“You dear creatures,” she cried, “what a salvation you are!” Whereat, she took one to the back room, uncorked it, and poured out a noggin of whiskey apiece for each of her customers, and the “throat trouble” gave way to a discussion of, “What tasty stuff it is, this whiskey!”

Shortly after this, my uncle was discharged for staying out from work one morning, after a night of intoxication, and he finally secured a new position in the South End. Rather than have the fuss of going to his work on the street-cars, he rented a house, and we removed. This house was a cottage, the first one we had lived in since coming to America. It stood on a street corner, near a wide square, where the thousands of cyclists came after supper for road races, “runs,” and a circle around the neck of land which jutted out into Buzzards Bay. Ours was the show place of that neighborhood; from the branches of the rotting cherry tree in the front yard, I could watch the crowds come and go, without the trouble of going away from the house. Directly opposite us, buried in a maze of maple branches, with a high-fenced yard back of it, stood an Orphan’s Home. The street-car line terminated in front of our door. It was, to me, a very aristocratic neighborhood indeed. I felt somewhat puffed up about it. There were several saloons within a few minute’s walk. My aunt regarded that as a feature not to be despised. She had explained to uncle: “You see we can get it in cans, and not have to go and sit away from home and all its comforts.”

This change of residence meant also a change of work for me. I left the spinning-room, left Curley, Mallet, Mary, Zippy, and the others, and went into the mule-room to learn back-boying with my uncle.

The mule-room is generally the most skilled section of a cotton-mill. Its machinery is more human in its action than is a loom, or a carding machine, or a ring-spinning frame. There are no women or girls in a mule-spinning room. Men spin the yarn, and boys attend to the wants of the machines as back-boys, tubers, and doffers.

One Saturday afternoon, shortly after we had settled in our new home, aunt and uncle went cityward, entered a music store, and said, “We want to look over a piano.”

The clerk immediately took them in the direction of the high-priced, latest models.

“No,” said aunt, “them’s not the ones we want to buy. Mister, you haven’t got something cheaper, have you?”

“How cheap?” asked the clerk.

“Well,” said my aunt, “I shouldn’t care to go very high. Say a second-hander.”

The clerk took them to the rear of the store, to a dim corner. Here he turned on the light, and showed a row of table-pianos. Aunt and uncle stopped before one of them, a scratched, faded veteran, of many concert-hall and ballroom experiences. Its keys were yellow, with black, gaps where some were missing. One of the pedal rods was broken off, while the other was fastened with thin wire. Uncle, with professional nonchalance, whirled a creaky stool to the desired height, sat down, turned back his cuffs, and struck a handful of chords, like a warhorse in battle again, with a vivid reminiscence of old English public-house days. There came from the depths of the aged lyre a tinkling, tinpannish strain of mixed flats.

“It’s real good,” smiled my aunt.

“It needs tuning,” commented the clerk.

“How much is it worth, tuned?” asked my uncle.

“Fifteen dollars,” announced the clerk.

“On time, how much?” asked aunt eagerly. “We can only put in three dollars on this at first,” she said.

“Fifteen dollars on credit, at your own terms,” said the clerk, after a brief consultation with the manager in the office. “We need the room, and will be glad to get it out of the way.” “It’s ours, then,” said my uncle. “Send it down as soon as you get it tuned,” he directed.

When they told me about the purchase, uncle announced, “It will keep me at home, I hope, and away from the saloons. It will be fine to get to playing again. I miss it so. I must be all out of practise.”

When the piano did come, and it was established in the front room, I spent a whole evening in fingering it. There was only one defect about it,--when uncle played a tune, one of the keys had a fault of sticking, so that he had to lift it bodily into place, and that somewhat broke in on the melody he was engaged on.

“But what can you expect for fifteen dollars,” he commented, philosophically. “When folks are singing with it, I can skip it, an’ it won’t be noticed much.”

The advent of the piano made my days in the mill lighter to bear. My uncle had proposed to teach me to play on it at night if I would practise faithfully. He took pains to elaborate the truth that great musicians, who had come to fame in the earth, had done so only at the cost of infinite pains in practise.

“Never mind,” I responded, “I’ll learn, sure enough, and I may give lessons some day.” So, during work-hours, I was given the scale to memorize.

“F,a,c,e, is the name of the spaces,” he taught. “Face, it spells; you can remember that.” Then he had me memorize the notes on the lines, and then he let me try it on the piano, a night of joy to me. Day after day I would plan for these practises, and in three regular lessons, of two weeks’ duration, I had the joy of grinding out my first real four-part tune. I had been practising laboriously, with a strict regard for exact time, the selection he had set before me, when he called from the kitchen, “Hurry up the tune a bit, Al!” I did, and I was bewildered to find that the chaotic tangle of notes resolved itself, when played faster, into the simple, universal melody, “Home, Sweet Home!”

But I found not enough patience, after being in the mill all day, to isolate myself every night in the house when there was fresh air to enjoy outside, so I told uncle that I had better give up taking lessons. I could not keep them up. I wanted the fresh air more.

But uncle was loath for me to do that. “I want you to do something else besides work in the mill,” he remonstrated. About this time, I became acquainted with Alf Martin, a back-boy, who was playing the piano. His father worked on the mules next to my uncle. The two men talked the matter over, and one day Alf told me that the woman he was taking lessons from, a Miss Flaffer, had said she would give me fifty-cent lessons for thirty-five cents! My uncle said he would pay half of the cost, and in spite of my previous abandonment of music, I succumbed to this scheme, secretly, in my heart, glad of the opportunity of taking lessons from so fine a lady as Alf told me Miss Flaffer was.

“When you pay for lessons,” said my uncle, “you’ll think more of them. I could only take you as far as vamping, and you want to do more than that.”

Previous to this, I had gotten as much joy, during the week’s work, from anticipations of cream puffs, pork pies, and such minor Saturday joys, but now I had a piano lesson, a real music-lesson, to engage my mind, and that was a very cheerful week spent behind the mules. Alf and I spent much time, when we could get away from the eyes of the bosses, talking over Miss Flaffer, and I came to understand that she was a fine woman indeed.

The following Saturday afternoon, then, I took my Beginner’s Book, tied it in a roll and fastened it with twine, and went on the street-car to a very aristocratic part of the city. It was the part where, on first landing in America, I had gone on summer days, asking at the back doors if I might pick the pears that had fallen to the lawns from the trees.

Miss Flaffer’s house was a very small cottage, with a small piazza at its front, and with a narrow lawn, edged by a low fence, running around it. It was altogether a very pretty place, with its new paint, its neat windows, and the flowers between the curtains. The front steps had evidently never been trodden on by foot of man, for why did they shine so with paint! There was not a scratch on the porch, nor a pencil mark. I looked at the number, at the engraved door-plate, and found that “S. T. Flaffer” did reside within. A great, cold perspiration dripped from me as I put a trembling finger on the push-button. I heard an answering bell somewhere in the depths of the house, and then wished that I might run away. It seemed so bold a thing for me, a mill-boy, to be intruding myself on such aristocratic premises. But I could not move, and then Miss Flaffer herself opened the door!

Oh, dream of neatness, sweetness, and womanly kindness! Miss Flaffer was that to me at the moment. She was a picture, that put away my aunt and all the tenement women who came into our house for beer-drinking, put them away from memory entirely. I thought that she would send me home, and tell me to look tidy before I knocked at her door, or that I had made a mistake, and that such a woman, with her white hands, could not be giving thirty-five cent piano lessons to Al Priddy, a mill-boy!

Oh, how awkward, self-conscious, and afraid I felt as I went across that threshold and looked on comforts that were luxuries to me! There was a soft, loose rug on a hardwood, polished floor, on which, at first, I went on a voyage halfway, when the crumpled rug half tripped me and I caught desperately at a fragile chair and half wrenched it from position to stay myself, yet Miss Flaffer did not scold me, nor did she seem to notice me. Then, as we went through a luxurious dining-room (where they did nothing but eat meals!), I found myself bringing my foot down on the train of Miss Flaffer’s dress. Yet, when the confusion was over, she never made a single reference to it, though I felt that I ought to ask her if I had torn it. She led me to a little studio, where, in a curtained alcove, stood a black upright piano polished like a mirror, and before it a stool, which did not squeak like ours when turned into position.

When the preliminary examination was over, and I was seated at the piano, Miss Flaffer asked me to play “Home, Sweet Home” as I had learned under my uncle’s instruction. I had been so used to the hard, mechanical working of uncle’s instrument that I naturally pounded unduly on Miss Flaffer’s, until she politely and graciously said, “Please do not raise your fingers so high,” and to that end, she placed two coppers on my hand, and told me to play the tune without letting them drop.

After the tune, and while Miss Flaffer had left the room to get her notebook, I noted with chagrin that my perspiring fingers had left marks on the snowy keyboard where they would surely be seen. I listened, and heard Miss Flaffer rummaging among some books, and then desperately spat on my coat cuff and rubbed the keyboard vigorously until I thought that I had obliterated the traces of my fingers. Then Miss Flaffer returned, and I tried to act unconcernedly by whistling, under my breath, “After the Ball.”

By the time the lesson was over, it was raining outside, and Miss Flaffer said, “I have to go to the corner of the next street, Albert. (Albert!) I want you to share my umbrella with me so that you will not get wet.”

I mumbled, “All right, I don’t care if I do,” and prepared to go. Before we had left the house I had put on my hat twice and opened and shut the door once in my extreme excitement. Then we went out, and there rushed to my mind, from my reading, the startling question, “How to act when walking on the street with a fine woman, and there is an umbrella?” I said, when we were on the sidewalk, “Please let me carry that,” and pointed to the umbrella. “Certainly,” she said, and handed it to me. Before we had attained the corner, I had managed to poke the ends of the umbrella ribs down on Miss Flaffer’s hat, and to knock it somewhat askew. I found, also, that I was shielding myself to such an extent as to leave Miss Flaffer exposed to the torrents of rain. On the street corner, she took the umbrella, and, as my car came into view, she said, “Good-by, Albert. You did very well to-day. Practise faithfully, and be sure to come next week.” I called, “So long,” and ran for the car.

I only took two other lessons from Miss Flaffer. I never had the manners to send her word that I could no longer afford them. I was afraid that she would offer to teach me free, and I could not stand the confinement to the house after a hard day in the mill. But I had learned something besides piano-playing with her. I had seen fine manners contrasted against my own uncouth ways. I had seen a dustless house contrasted against my own ill-kept home. I had been called Albert!

Chapter XII. Machinery and Manhood

Chapter XII. Machinery and Manhood

My work in the spinning-room, in comparison with my new work in the mule-room, had been mere child’s play. At last the terror of the mill began to blacken my life. The romance, the glamour, and the charm were gone by this only a daily dull, animal-like submission to hard tasks had hold of me now.

Five days of the week, at the outer edge of winter, I never stood out in the daylight. I was a human mole, going to work while the stars were out and returning home under the stars. I saw none of the world by daylight, except the staring walls, high picket-fences, and drab tenements of that immediate locality. The sun rose and set on the wide world outside, rose and set five times a week, but I might as well have been in a grave; there was no exploration abroad.

The mule-room atmosphere was kept at from eighty-five to ninety degrees of heat. The hardwood floor burned my bare feet. I had to gasp quick, short gasps to get air into my lungs at all. My face seemed swathed in continual fire. The tobacco chewers expectorated on the floor, and left little pools for me to wade through. Oil and hot grease dripped down behind the mules, sometimes falling on my scalp or making yellow splotches on my overalls or feet. Under the excessive heat my body was like a soft sponge in the fingers of a giant; perspiration oozed from me until it seemed inevitable that I should melt away at last. To open a window was a great crime, as the cotton fiber was so sensitive to wind that it would spoil. (Poor cotton fiber!) When the mill was working, the air in the mule-room was filled with a swirling, almost invisible cloud of lint, which settled on floor, machinery, and employees, as snow falls in winter. I breathed it down my nostrils ten and a half hours a day; it worked into my hair, and was gulped down my throat. This lint was laden with dust, dust of every conceivable sort, and not friendly at all to lungs.

There are few prison rules more stringent than the rules I worked under in that mule-room. There are few prisoners watched with sterner guards than were the bosses who watched and ordered me from this task to that.

There was a rule against looking out of a window. The cotton mills did not have opaque glass or whitewashed windows, then. There was a rule against reading during work-hours. There was a rule preventing us from talking to one another. There was a rule prohibiting us from leaving the mill during work-hours. We were not supposed to sit down, even though we had caught up with our work. We were never supposed to stop work, even when we could. There was a rule that anyone coming to work a minute late would lose his work. The outside watchman always closed the gate the instant the starting whistle sounded, so that anyone unfortunate enough to be outside had to go around to the office, lose time, and find a stranger on his job, with the prospect of being out of work for some time to come.

For the protection of minors like myself, two notices were posted in the room, and in every room of the mill. They were rules that represented what had been done in public agitation for the protection of such as I: rules which, if carried out, would have taken much of the danger and the despair from my mill life. They read:

“The cleaning of machinery while it is in motion is positively forbidden!”

“All Minors are hereby prohibited from working during the regular stopping hours!”

If I had insisted on keeping the first law, I should not have held my position in the mule-room more than two days. The mule-spinners were on piece work, and their wages depended upon their keeping the mules in motion, consequently the back-boy was expected, by a sort of unwritten understanding, to do all the cleaning he could, either while the machines were in motion or during the hours when they were stopped, as during the noon-hour or before the mill started in the morning. If a back-boy asked for the mules to be stopped while he did the cleaning, he was laughed at, and told to go to a very hot place along with his “nerve.” I should have been deemed incapable had I demanded that the machinery be stopped for me. The spinner would have merely said, “Wait till dinner time!”

Not choosing to work during the stopping hour, I should merely have been asked to quit work, for the spinner could have made it impossible for me to retain my position.

So I just adapted myself to conditions as they were, and broke the rules without compunction. I had to clean fallers, which, like teeth, chopped down on one’s hand, unless great speed and precautions were used. I stuck a hand-brush into swift-turning pulleys, and brushed the cotton off; I dodged past the mules and the iron posts they met, just in time to avoid being crushed. Alfred Skinner, a close friend of mine, had his body pinned and crushed badly. I also tried to clean the small wheels which ran on tracks while they were in motion, and, in doing so, I had to crawl under the frame and follow the carriage as it went slowly forward, and dodge back rapidly as the carriage came back on the jump. In cleaning these wheels, the cotton waste would lump, and in the mad scramble not to have the wheels run over it to lift the carriage and do great damage to the threads, I would risk my life and fingers to extract the waste in time. One day the wheel nipped off the end of my little finger, though that was nothing at all in comparison to what occurred to some of my back-boy friends in other mills. Jimmy Hendricks to-day is a dwarfed cripple from such an accident. Hern Hanscom has two fingers missing, Earl Rogers had his back broken horribly. Yet the notices always were posted, the company was never liable, and the back-boy had no one but himself to blame; yet he could not be a back-boy without taking the risk, which shows how much humanity there can be in law.

Legally I worked ten and a half hours, though actually the hours were very much longer. The machinery I could not clean while in motion, and which the spinner would not stop for me during work-hours, I had to leave until noon or early morning. Then, too, the spinner I worked for paid me to take over some of his work that could be done during the stopping hours, so that there was a premium on those valuable hours, and I got very little time out of doors or at rest. There were generally from three to four days in the week when I worked thirteen and thirteen hours and a half a day, in order to catch up with the amount of work that I had to do to retain my position.

In all, at this time I had five men over me who had the right to boss me. They were: two spinners, the overseer, second hand, and third hand. One of the spinners was a kindly man, very considerate of my strength and time, while the other was the most drunken and violent-tempered man in the room. He held his position only by virtue of having married the overseer’s sister. He was a stunted, bow-legged man, always in need of a shave. He wagged a profane tongue on the slightest provocation, and tied to me the most abusive epithets indecency ever conjured with. He always came to work on Monday mornings with a severe headache, a sullen mood, and filled himself with Jamaica ginger, which, on account of its percentage of alcohol, served him the same palatable, stimulating, and satisfying functions of whisky without making him unfit to walk up and down his alley between his dangerous mules.

By having to be in the mill when the machinery was stopped, I was forced to listen to the spinners as they held their lewd, immoral, and degenerate conversation. It was rarely that a decent subject was touched upon; there seemed to be few men there willing to exclude profligacy from the rote. This was because “Fatty” Dunding, a rounded knot of fat, with a little twisted brain and a black mouth, was the autocrat of the circle, and, withal, a man who delighted to talk openly of his amours and his dirty deeds. As there were no women or girls in the room, significant words and suggestive allusions were shouted back and forth over the mules, whisperings, not too low for a skulking, fascinated boy, hidden behind a wastebox, to drink in, were in order during the noon-hour. The brothel, the raid of a brothel, the selling of votes, and references to women, formed the burden of these conferences. Occasionally some spinner would “Hush” out loud, there would be a warning hand held up, but only occasionally.

God had not endowed me with any finer feelings than most of the lads I worked with, but outside the mill I put myself in closer touch with refining things than some of them: reading, occasional attendance on a Sunday-school and a mission, and in me there was always a never-to-be-downed ambition to get an education. That is why those conversations I was forced to hear were like mud streaks daubed with a calloused finger across a clear conscience. It was like hearkening to the licking of a pig in a sty after God in His purity has said sweet things. I felt every fine emotion toward womankind, and toward manhood, brutalized, impiously assaulted. I felt part of the guilt of it because I was linked in work with it all. That mule-room and its associations became repugnant. My spirit said, “I will not stand it.” My will said, “You’ll have to. What else can you do?”

That became the question which held the center of the state in my rebellion against the mill. “What else could I do?”

I wanted an education. I wanted to take my place among men who did more than run machines. I wanted to “make something of myself.”

The arousement of this ambitious spirit in me was curiously linked with the reading of a great number of five-cent novels which had to do with the “Adventures” of Frank Merriwell. This young hero was a manly man, who lived an ideal moral life among a group of unprincipled, unpopular, and even villainous students at Yale College. Frank had that Midas touch by which every character he touched, no matter how sodden, immediately became changed to pure gold. Frank himself was an intense success in everything he did or undertook. He preached temperance, purity of speech, decency, fairness, and honor. He had both feet on the topmost principle in the moral code. True, with romantic prodigality he did everything under any given conditions with epic success. If he went to a track-meet as a spectator, and the pole vaulter suddenly had a twisted tendon, Frank could pull off his coat, take the pole and at the first try, smash all existing records. A Shakesperian actor would be suddenly taken ill, and Frank would leap from a box, look up the stage manager, dress, and take the rôle so successfully that everybody would be amazed at his art. It was the same with all branches of sport, or study, of social adventure--he did everything in championship form. But back of it all were good habits, fair speech, heroic chivalry, and Christian manliness, and the reading of it did me good, aroused my romantic interest in college, made me eager to live as clean a life as Frank amidst such profligacy as I had to meet. That reading spoiled me ever after for the mill, even if there had been nothing else to spoil me. I, too, a poor mill lad, with little chance for getting money, with so sober a background as was against my life, wanted to make my mark in the world as the great figures in history had done. I immediately made a special study of the literature of ambition. I took the Success Magazine, read the first part of Beecher’s biography, where he made a tablecloth of an old coat, and fought through adverse circumstances. I fellowshipped with Lincoln as he sprawled on the hearth and made charcoal figures on the shovel. I felt that there must be something beyond the mill for me. But the question always came, “What else can you do?”

And the question had great, tragic force, too. I had not strength enough to make a success in the mule-room. I had an impoverished supply of muscle. My companions could outlift me, outwork me, and the strenuous, unhealthy work was weakening me. The long hours without fresh air made me faint and dizzy. One of the back-boys, himself a sturdy fellow, in fun, poked my chest, and when I gave back with pain, he laughed, and sneered “Chicken-breasted!” That humiliated me, and I might have been found thereafter gasping in the vitiated air, enthused by the hope that I could increase my chest expansion a few inches; and I also took small weights and worked them up and down with the intention of thickening my muscles!

“What else can you do?” That haunted me. It would not be long before I should have to give in: to tell my overseer that I had not strength enough to do the work. Yet, as if Fate had obsessed me with the idea, I could not bring myself to think that the world was open to exploration; that there were easier tasks. I was curiously under the power of the fatalistic, caste thought, that once a mill-boy, always a mill-boy. I could not conceive there was any other chance in another direction. That was part of the terror of the mill in those days.

So that dream, “to make something of myself,” with a college appended, only made my days in the mill harder to bear. When the sun is warm, and you, yourself are shut in a chilly room, the feeling is intensified tragedy.

But day after day I had to face the thousands of bobbins I had in charge and keep them moving. Thousands of things turning, turning, turning, emptying, emptying, emptying, and requiring quick fingers to keep moving. A fight with a machine is the most cunning torture man can face--when the odds are in favor of the machine. There are no mistaken calculations, no chances with a machine except a break now and then of no great consequence. A machine never tires, is never hungry, has no heart to make it suffer. It never sleeps, and has no ears to listen to that appeal for “mercy,” which is sent to it. A machine is like Fate. It is Fate, itself. On, on, on, on it clicks, relentlessly, insistently, to the end, in the set time, in the set way! It neither goes one grain too fast or too slow. Once started, it must go on, and on, and on, to the end of the task. Such was the machine against which I wrestled--in vain. It was feeding Cerebus, with its insatiable appetite. The frames were ever hungry; there was always a task ahead, yes, a dozen tasks ahead, even after I had worked, exerted myself to the uttermost. I never had the consolation of knowing that I had done my work. The machine always won.

I did take a rest. I had to steal it, just as a slave would. I had to let the machine go on, and on, and on without me sometimes, while I took a rest and let the tasks multiply. That meant double effort after I got up, getting in the mill a little earlier on the morrow, a shorter time for dinner at noon. The tasks had to be done in the end, but I took some rest. I hid from the eyes of the overseer, the second hand, the third hand, and the spinners, behind waste boxes and posts, and had spare minutes with a book I had brought in and hidden under some cotton, or with dreaming about “making something of myself, some day.” If I let myself dream beyond the minute, a vile oath would seek me out, and I would hear my Jamaica-ginger-drinking-spinner sneering, “You filthy----! Get that oiling done!”

Chapter XIII. How my Aunt and Uncle Entertained the Spinners

Chapter XIII. How my Aunt and Uncle Entertained the Spinners

Meantime there was poor consolation in my home. Aunt and uncle were drinking every night. Aunt, with the advantage over my uncle, was drinking much during the day.

When our dinners came, carried by a neighbor’s boy, they were generally cold, cheerless combinations of canned tongue, store bread lavishly spread with butter, jelly roll, and a bottle of cold soda water, either strawberry or ginger flavor! We knew what that sort of dinner meant. Aunt Millie was drunk at home, too much intoxicated to make a warm dinner. We had to work through the afternoon, knowing that when we arrived home at night we should find her either at a saloon, in a back room at a neighbor’s, or at home, helpless, incoherent.

“Oh, Al,” sighed my uncle, “I don’t see what we’re coming to. What’s the use of you and me slaving here and she taking on so? Do you wonder, lad, that it’s hard for me to keep a pledge? It just drives me mad. Here we have to go on through the day, working ourselves to death, only to have the money go in that way! It’s torture, and always sets me off into drink, too!”

When we arrived home on such nights, uncle would have stored up an afternoon of wrath, and, on entering the house, would unload it on aunt. She would work herself into an hysterical paroxysm, screaming, shrieking, pawing, and frothing at the mouth, so that uncle would suddenly leave her to me and go off for the night to a saloon.

In the morning, when both were sober, would occur the real disheartening quarrel, when aunt would tell uncle he lied if he said she had been drunk; the words would get more and more heated until, in an unbearable fit of rage, insults would be exchanged and lead up to a struggle, a bloody struggle, that sometimes was on the threshold of murder.

That day there would be no dinner for us at all, and I would have to run out to the gates and buy something like an apple-roll or a pie. At night we would find aunt sitting down, perfectly sober, but silent, and with no supper ready.

“Get it yourself, you old fiend,” she would announce. Uncle would leave the house and get his meal in an eating-house, while aunt would make me a supper and scold me while I ate it, for she always considered me as one of her secret enemies, and linked my name with my uncle’s in almost every quarrel.

But there were few quarrels of long standing between my foster parents. They were generally patched up with a drink or two. Then the wheel would turn again and produce exactly the same conditions as before.

One day, uncle, in a noble-minded effort to get away from temptation, told us that he had decided to board in another place, where he could live in peace. But aunt visited all the boarding-houses that she knew, finally found her husband in one at the North End, and scolded him so unmercifully, and unloaded so much weight of family history, that he came back to the South End with her on the car, took a pail, and brought back a quart of beer, and things went on as before.

After we had established our piano, and when uncle had become well acquainted with the spinners, he proposed to invite some of them with their wives for a “house-warming.”

The event occurred on a Saturday night. “Fatty” Dunding came, and brought an unknown woman with him, whom he tickled under the chin in play quite often, and told her that she was a “stunner in that new piece of hair, even better looking than in t’other lighter shade!” Tom Fellows, a tall man with a poetic face, brought his wife and child, a baby of seven months. There was a bass-voiced spinner named Marvin present, and he brought a roll of music with him.

“What hast’ got in, Stanny?” asked “Fatty.” “Summat to warm cockles o’ t’ ’eart?”

Uncle told him that there was half a barrel of beer in the cellar: that there were several bottles of port wine in the pantry, and that there was a taste of whiskey and a few softer drinks on hand.

By eight o’clock the program began to shape itself. Marvin undid his roll, at the first request, placed before my uncle a copy of “White Wings,” and asked, as the Hadfield bassoes had in the former days in the parlors of the “Linnet’s Nest,” and the “Blue Sign,” “Can t’ play it?”

And uncle responded, “Hum it o’er!” Marvin bent down his head as if in the act of telling a secret, hummed it over for a few bars, when uncle, after fingering with his chords, struck the pitch, and began to vamp gloriously.

“Wait till I play t’ introduction,” he said, and he hunched back, and confidently “introduced” the air to the satisfaction of all. Marvin sang “White Wings,” and after he had dampened his pipe with a noggin of whiskey, he asked uncle if he knew “I am a Friar of Orders Grey?”

Uncle said, again, “Hum it o’er.” When the introduction had been given, Marvin began a tumbling performance on the low notes that won great applause.

“Tha’ went so low, lad, that we couldna’ ’ear thee, eh, folks?” grinned “Fatty.”

“Hear, hear! Hen-core, hen-core!” shouted the audience, but Marvin said that he’d better rest. Singing low tickled his whistle unduly.

But uncle knew “Sally In Our Alley,” which Tom Fellows sang with a lift of his light brows at the high notes, and a crinkling of his chin as he bent his head to get the low ones. Tom had almost a feminine voice; a romantic chord ran through all his singing, so that he was at his best in an original song of his, which he had written shortly before and was having the bandmaster set to four-part music for the piano. “Hum it,” said uncle. And Tom went through the usual process until uncle had the key, the time, and the chords. Tom’s song, which was later published at his own expense, began:

“Bright was the day, Bells ringing gay, When to church I brought my Sue. I felt so proud ’Mongst all the crowd”--

and Uncle Stanwood considerably increased his reputation for improvisation when at the end of the verse, where Tom lingered lovingly on the sentiment to the extent of four full rests, he introduced a set of trills!

With this part of the program over, the company retired to the cellar, where there was a boarded floor, a man with a concertina, and a half-barrel of beer. There followed a square dance and some more singing, but the beer was the chief enjoyment.

It was not long before drink had inflamed the peculiarities of temper of our guests. “Fatty” let loose his oaths and his foul speech, while Uncle Stanwood nearly got into a fight with him over it, but was prevented by Tom Fellows falling against him, in a drunken lurch, thereby diverting the issue. My aunt’s tongue had a sting to it, and she was in a corner telling Mrs. Fellows that she, Mrs. Fellows, was not married to Tom, or else she would have her marriage certificate framed in the house, or, at least, could show it in the photograph album! Marvin was roaring “Rule Britannia,” with the energy and incoherency of a bull. I told “Fatty” that he had better go home or else I would send for the police, and when he aimed his fist at my head, I merely dodged and he fell with a crash to the floor and went off into a piggish snoring. Tom Fellows took his drunken leave, forgetting his wife, who was just then calling my aunt a series of uncomplimentary names. In some sort of way, our guests left us in the early morning. Then I saw that aunt and uncle were safely to sleep where they chanced to have stumbled, turned out the lamps, locked the door, and went to bed.

The next morning the Sabbath sun lighted up a sickening memento of the house-warming. Glasses were scattered about with odorous dregs of liquor in them. Chairs were overturned, and there were big splotches on the tablecloth in the kitchen, where port wine had been spilled. There was a lamp still burning, which I had overlooked, and it was sending out a sickly, oily fume. The house was like a barroom, with bottles scattered about the kitchen, clothes that had been left, and my foster parents yet in a drunken sleep where I had left them!

When Monday morning came, uncle was unfit to go to work. He told Aunt Millie so, and she immediately scolded him and worked herself in so violent a rage that the matter ended by uncle picking up some of his clothes and saying, “This is the last you’ll see of me, Dame! I’m going to some other place where I’ll be away from it. Al, there, can keep you on his four dollars a week--if he wants! I’m done!”

“And how about the debts, you--coward!” cried aunt. “I’ll send the police after you, mind!”

“Let debts go to the dogs,” said my uncle. “You’ll always manage to have the beer-wagon call!” And then he left the house.

He did not come to work that morning, and when the overseer asked me where he was, I said that uncle had left home and would not be back, so a spare man was put on uncle’s mules.

That day, opened with such gloom, was one of thick shadows for me. The outlook was certainly disheartening. Why should I have to stand it all? It was my wages that were making some of this squalor possible. It was my money that helped purchase the beer. Then the old question obtruded itself: “What other thing can you do? You’ll have to stay in the mill!”

I lost my heart then. I saw no way out from the mill, yet I knew that in the end, and that not long removed, the mill would overpower me and set me off on one side, a helpless, physical wreck. It was just a matter of a year or two, and that waiting line of out-of-works, which always came into the mule-room in the morning, would move up one, as the head boy was given my place.

Late in that afternoon, with the hands on the clock going slower than ever, and the bitterness of my life full before me, I began to think of suicide. I imagined that it would be the easiest and safest exit from it all. It would end the misery, the pain, the distraction, and the impending uselessness of my body for work! It was so easy, too. I took up a three-pound weight, and put it on a pile of bobbins high above my head. I balanced it on the edge where the merest touch would allow it to crash to the floor. Then I experimented with it, allowing it to fall to see how much force there was to it. I speculated as to whether it would kill me instantly or not. It was a great temptation. It just meant a touch of the finger, a closing of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and it would be over! I tried to imagine how sorry and repentant my aunt and uncle would feel. It might make them stop drinking. It was worth doing, then. But suddenly there loomed up the fact that there are two sides to a grave, and the thought of God, a judgment, and an eternity dazed me. I was afraid. I put the weight back, and thought: “Well, I guess I’ll have to do the best I can, but it’s hard!”

Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a Union for Good Works

Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a Union for Good Works

After he had been away from home two weeks, uncle sent us a letter from a Rhode Island mill-town, informing us that he had the malaria, bad. Would one of us come and bring him home? There was a postscript which read: “Be sure and come for me either on a Monday, Wednesday, or a Friday. They are the alternate days when I don’t have the shivers.”

The day he came home he and aunt patched up peace over a pailful of beer, and there the matter ended, save that echoes of it would be heard at the next wrangle. Uncle took his place in one of the long lines of unemployed that wait for work at the end of the mill alleys. The expenses of the household were dependent upon the four dollars and a half I was earning at the time.

Then came the oppressive hot days of summer, with their drawn-out days with sun and cheerful huckleberry fields in their glory, a summer day which I could not enjoy because I was shut out from it by the mill windows, and it was against the rules to look out of them. Some of the fellows left their work in the summer, and loafed like plutocrats, having the whole day and three meals to themselves. But if I had loafed I should have had neither money nor peace. My aunt would have made a loafing day so miserable for me that I should have been glad to be away from her scolding. Neither would she have fed me, and, all in all, I should have been the loser.

But the evenings were long and cool after the mill closed for the night. From half-past six to ten offered me many enticements, chief among which was the privilege of roaming the streets with the Point Roaders, a gang of mill-boys, into which I was admitted after I had kicked the shins of “Yellow Belly,” the leader. I was naturally drawn to make friends with Jakey McCarty, a merry fellow of deep designs, who would put a string around my neck while pretending to plan a walk somewhere, or have his finger in my pocket, poking for cigarette money, while talking about the peggy game he had last played.

In the winter we had a very lonesome time of it, as a gang. All we could do that was exciting included standing on a drug-store corner, where we splashed the icy waters of a drinking trough in one another’s faces, or attended, en masse, an indoor bicycle race at the “Rink,” then in its glory. But we kept very close to the drinking trough, as money was not very plentiful.

I grew tired of mere loafing, and I finally persuaded Jakey McCarty, who liked reading, to go with me and visit the public library at least once a week, when we secured books, and while there also rooted among the back numbers of illustrated magazines and comic papers and made a night of it. But the gang resented this weekly excursion and separation, and various members reproached us with the stigma, “Libree-struck!” which, I always supposed, carried with it the same significance as “sun struck,” i.e., crazy over books.

In the following spring, though, the gang put up a parallel bar in an empty lot, and spent the early evenings in athletic diversions. When darkness came on, there were usually Wild West hold-ups, Indian dances, and cattle round-ups, in imitation of the features we read in the five-cent novels we bought and exchanged among ourselves. Then, with the putting on of long trousers, the gang became more active, and roamed at night over a broader area than before. Two of the gang even left us because they were “love-struck.”

At the end of the following winter the catalogue of the various activities of the gang would read like a chapter from the Hunnish Invasion. There were Saturday night excursions up to the center of the city, which led us through Water street, through the Jewish and the Portuguese sections. As we passed by a grocery store, with tin advertising signs projecting from its doorway, we would line up, and each lad would leap in the air and snap his fist against the sign, producing a loud clatter and leaving it vibrating at great speed. Before the clerks had appeared on the scene we had passed on, and mixed with the Saturday night throng of shoppers. Our next stop was before a Jewish butcher shop, in front of which, on a projecting hook, hung a cow’s heart and liver. Forming another line, the gang would leap again and catch that a resounding slap with the palm. Then one of the fellows poked his head in the shop door, and called, “Say, daddy, we’ll give yer five cents if you’ll let us take three more slaps!” On the next block, we came across a venerable Israelite, long-bearded and somnolent, watching for custom before his one-windowed clothing shop. Jakey leaped forward, gave a vigorous tug on the venerable’s beard, and we broke into a run, with a shrieking, horrified group of Jews in mad pursuit.

Our objective in this series of adventures had been the Union for Good Works, a benevolent institution, with splendid rooms, to which we went for our shower-bath; cost, five cents!

After we had taken our baths, and while we were busy with nine-pins, Jakey stood at an opposite end of the room, and plastered the frescoed walls of the Union for Good Works with the pasty contents of a silver package of cream cheese, to which he had helped himself at the stall of a large public market. That same night, when we arrived at the South End and were disbanding, Jakey set on view before our astonished eyes a five-pound pail of lard, a cap, and several plugs of tobacco, which he carried home and presented to his mother, saying that he had been to an auction!

Such are only a few of the adventures in which we indulged after a depressing day of it in the mill. One Fourth of July night we roamed over the city, through the aristocratic section, and in a wild, fanatical, mob-spirit, entirely without a thought as to the criminal lengths of our action, leaped over low fences, went through gates and ran on lawns, tramping down flower-beds, crushing down shrubs, and snatching out of their sockets the small American flags with which the houses were decorated.

The only religious declaration the gang made came in the winter, when, on dull Sunday afternoons, merely for the walk it offered and the entertainments to which it gave us the entrée, we joined the classes in the Mission. I enjoyed sitting near the aristocratic, finely dressed young woman who instructed me as to the mighty strength of Samson, the musical and shepherding abilities of David, the martial significance of Joshua, and the sterling qualities of St. Paul. Most truly was my interest centered in the jeweled rings my teacher wore, or in the dainty scent that was wafted from her lace handkerchief when she gave one of those cute little feminine coughs! How far away, after all, was she from a knowledge of our lives and the conditions under which we lived! She aimed well, but whatever she intended, in her secret heart, went very, very wide of the mark. She had no moral thrills to treat us to, nor did she ever couch her appeal in so definite a way as to disturb our sins one bit. Perhaps she did not think we needed such strong medicine. Maybe she classed us as “Poor, suffering mill-boys!” and let that suffice. We needed someone to shake us by the shoulders, and tell us that we were cowards, afraid to make men of ourselves. We needed a strong, manly fellow, just then, to tell us, in plain speech, about the sins we were following. We needed, more truly than all else, a man’s Man, a high, convincing Character, a Spiritual Ideal, The Christ, pointed out to us. But this was not done, and we left the Mission with derision in our hearts for things we ought to have respected. Some of the fellows lighted their cigarettes with the Sunday-school papers they had been presented with.

Many of the Monday evenings in winter were gala nights, when we marched to the Armory and watched the militia drill. On our return home, we walked through the streets with soldierly precision, wheeling, halting, presenting arms, and making skilful formations when “Yellow Belly” ordered.

In September, the rules were posted in the mill that all minors who could not read and write must attend public evening school, unless prevented by physical incapacity. Four of us, “Yellow Belly,” Jakey, Dutchy Hermann, and myself, had a consultation, and decided that we would take advantage of the evening school and improve our minds. But the remainder of the gang, with no other intention than to break up the school, went also, and though there was a special officer on guard, and a masculine principal walking on rubber soles through the halls and opening classroom doors unexpectedly, they had their fling.

An evening school in a mill city is a splendid commentary on ambition. There one finds ambition at its best. After a day’s work of ten and a half hours, tired, tired, tired with the long day of heat and burden-bearing, lungs choking for inhalations of fresh, cool air, faces flushed with the dry heat of the room, ears still dulled by the roar and clank of machines, brains numbed by hours and hours of routine--yet there they are, men grown, some of them with moustaches, growing lads of fifteen, and sixteen, girls and women, all of many nationalities, spending a couple of the precious hours of their freedom scratching on papers, counting, musing over dry stuff, all because they want to atone for past intellectual neglect. I was there because I wanted to push past fractions and elementary history, and go on towards the higher things. I was entirely willing to forego priceless hours for two nights a week to get more of a knowledge of the rudiments from which I had been taken by the mill.

I had a seat quite back in the room, because I had intimations that some of the gang were going to “cut up,” and that a back seat would put me out of the danger zone of shooting peas, clay bullets, and other inventions. The man directly in front of me, with a first reader in his hand, was a tall Portuguese, the father of a family of children.

As soon as the starting gong had clanged through the halls, the gang began its operations. Dutchy, in spite of his avowed intention of seriously entering the school, pretended that he could not recite the alphabet. “Bunny,” a young Englishman, tried to pass himself off as a Swede and ignorant of English entirely. While the teachers were busy with the details of organization, the air was filled with riot, the special policeman was called in, and I along with the gang was threatened with arrest. Notwithstanding that such careful watch was maintained, the two weeks of night-school that I attended were filled with such disturbances that I grew discouraged and abandoned the project.

Whenever a circus or a fête, like the semi-centennial of the city, was advertised, the gang always planned to attend, in spite of the fact that the mills would not shut down. Six of us, in one room, by keeping away at noon, could cripple the mule-room so seriously that it could not run, and the spinners would get an afternoon off. Sometimes a group of spinners would hint to us to stay out that they might have a chance. That was my first experience in a form of labor-unionism.

Some of the men we worked under in the mill had a club-room, where they played table games, drank beer when the saloons were legally closed, and had Saturday night smokers, which my uncle attended, and where he was generally called upon to “vamp” on the piano.

The gang used to haunt this club, and, when there was a concert on, would climb up and look in the windows. Finally we decided that we ought to have a club-room of our own. We sought out and rented a shanty which had served as a tiny shop, we pasted pictures of actresses, prize fighters, and bicycle champions around the walls, had a small card table covered with magazines and newspapers, and initiated ourselves into the “club.”

The evenings of the first week we occupied, mainly, in sitting in front of the club, tilted back in chairs, and shouting to other mill lads, as they passed, in reply to their cynical salutations of “Gee, what style!” or, “Aw, blow off!” with a swaggering, “Ah, there, Jimmy. Come in and have a game!” Each member of the club kept from work a day, the better to taste the joys of club life to the full. About the fourth week, after we had held forth in a tempestuous whirl of boxing bouts, card matches, smoking bouts, and sensational novel-reading, the landlord repented of his bargain, locked us out, and declared to our remonstrance committee that he could no longer rent us the shanty, because we had become a “set of meddlin’ ne’er-do-wells!”

So we went back to the drug-store corner, with its drinking trough, where we could have been found huddled, miserable, like animals who have so much liberty and do not know how intelligently to use it. For we knew that after the night, came the morning, and with the morning another round in the mill, a fight with a machine, a ten hours’ dwelling in heated, spiceless, unexciting monotony, and a thought like that made us want to linger as long as we dared on that drug-store corner.

Chapter XV. The College Graduate Scrubber Refreshes my Ambitions

Chapter XV. The College Graduate Scrubber Refreshes my Ambitions

At sixteen years of age, after three years in a mill-room, and with the unsocial atmosphere of my home to discourage me, I had grown to discount that old ambition of mine, to “make something of myself.” My body had been beaten into a terrifying weakness and lassitude by the rigors of the mill. My esthetic sense of things had been rudely, violently assaulted by profanity, immorality, and vile indecencies. I had come to that fatalistic belief, which animates so many in the mill, that the social bars are set up, and are set up forever. I should always have to be in the mill. I should never get out of it!

Recurrently would pop up the old thought of self-destruction. There was some consolation in it too. I used to feel as if a great weight rested on my bent back: that it would weigh me down, as Christian’s sin had weighed him down, only mine was not the weight of sin, but the burden of social injustice. I seemed to be carrying the burden on a road that sloped upward, higher and higher, a road dark and haunted with chilly mists, growing darker, covering it. There was nothing but a climbing, a struggling ahead, nothing to walk into but gloom! What was the use of turning a finger to change it? I was branded from the first for the mill. You could turn back my scalp and find that my brain was a mill. You could turn back my brain, and find that my thoughts were a mill. I could never get out--away from the far-reaching touch of it. The pleasantest thing I enjoyed--an excursion to Cuttyhunk on a steamer, or a holiday at the ball game--had to be backgrounded against the mill. After everything, excursion, holiday, Sunday rest, a night of freedom on the street, an enjoyable illness of a day, a half day’s shut-down--the Mill! The Mill!

What difference did it make that I took question-and-answer grammar to the mill, and hid myself every now and then, to get it in my mind, or hurried my dinner that I might read it? After all, the mill, the toil, and the weakness. What difference did it make if I read good books, on my uncle’s recommendation? After I had gone through romance, there was the muddy prose of my life in the mill and at home!

Just then Fate, who served me so ungenerously as I thought, worked one more mortal into her wheel, brought one more from dreams and high purposes into the ring with me. He was a stout, pudgy-faced, lazy man of thirty, who came in to mop the floor, oil some of the pulleys, and keep some of the spare alleys cleaned.

But he was a college graduate! He was the first college graduate I had ever had the honor to work near. The overseers, our superintendent, were not graduates of a college. I was thrilled! That man, working at the end of my alley, scrubbing suds into the floor with a soggy broom, mopping them dry, pushing his pail of hot water before him, carrying a shaft pole or mopping along with a pail of grease in his hands--that man was a COLLEGE GRADUATE! All the dreams that I had indulged relative to classic halls, ivy-covered walls, the college fence, a dormitory, football field--all those dreams centered around that lumpish head, for the Scrubber had been to college! He represented to me the unattainable, the Mount Olympus top of ambitious effort. Suds, pail, soggy mop, grease pail, and lazy fat were transformed before me, for HE HAD BEEN TO COLLEGE!

What college had he graduated from? I do not know to this day. How had he stood in college? Another shrug of the shoulders must suffice. WHY was HE in THE MILL? I never paused in my hero adoration to ask that. Sufficient for me that he had been to college!

One day I made so bold as to address this personage. I went up shyly to him, one day, and said, “Could I make something of myself if I went to college?” He leaned on his mop, his light brows lifted, his cheeks puffed out like as if a frog were blowing itself up, then he said in a thick, dawdling voice, “You could either come out a thick head or a genius. It depends!” Then I made my great confession, “I’d like to go to college--if I only had the brains--and the money,” I confided. Then he seemed to be trying to swallow his tongue, while he thought of something germane to the conversation in hand.

Then he replied, “It does take brains to get through college!” and then turned to his work. I was not to be put off. I touched his overall brace, and asked, “Do you think that I might beg my way into college some day? Of course I wouldn’t be able to graduate with a title, like a regular student, but do you think they’d let me study there and try to make something of myself, sir?” The deference in my address must have brought him to attention with a little beyond his habitual speed, for he turned to me suddenly, and said, “Of course they will, you crazy kid!”

I left him then, left him with a new outlook into the future, for had I not been told by a REAL college graduate that I could get to college! Every former dream hitherto chained down broke loose at that, and I felt myself with a set of made-over ambitions. The seal, the signature, had been placed on officially. I could do it if I tried. I could get out of the mill; away from it. I could get an education that would give me a place outside it!

After that I began to fit myself for college! It was a fitting, though, of a poor sort. I did not know how to go about it. There seemed to be none in my circle overeager to tell me how to go about the matter. It was blind leading all the way.

I thought, first of all, that if I could get hold of some books of my own, my very own, that would be the first step toward an intellectual career. I had read the lives of several scholars, and their libraries were always mentioned. I thereupon resolved that I would own some books of my own.

The next stage in an intellectual career, was the reading of DRY books. I resolved that the books I purchased should be dry, likewise.

So after that I found real diversion in visiting the Salvation Army salvage rooms, where they had old books for which they asked five and ten cents apiece. The rooms were so laden with old clothes and all sorts of salvage that I had to root long and deep often to bring the books to light. I also went among the many second-hand shops and made the same sort of eager search.

After a few months of adventuring I had my own library of dry books. Their dryness will be evident from the check-list which follows.

I was especially delighted with my discovery, among a lot of old trousers in a second-hand shop, of a board-cover copy of “Watts on the Mind.” Its fine print, copious foot-notes, its mysterious references, as “Seq.,” “i.e.,” “Aris. Book IV., ff.,” put the stamp upon it as being a very scholarly book indeed. I looked it through, and not finding any conversation in it, judged that it was not too light. Its analytical chapter headings, and its birthmark, “182--,” fully persuaded me that I might get educated from that sort of a book!

In the salvage rooms, where I obtained most of my treasures, I obtained a black, cloth-bound book, with mottled damp pages and with a mouldy flavor to it, entitled, “Scriptural Doctrine,” which I knew was a dry book, because it was a religious book printed in the 40’s. It undertook to summarize all the great and fearsome doctrines from the Fall to the Recovery by massing every appropriate passage of scripture under them, and concluding, with loyalty to the major premises, with stout assertions that they were all true because they were. I also found, in the same place and on the same day, a well-worn, pencil-marked, dog-eared copy of “A History of the Ancient World,” filled with quaint wood-cuts of ruined walls, soldiers in battle, with steel spears and bare feet. It was covered with a crumpled piece of paper bag, and there were only two leaves missing two-thirds of the way in the book, cutting the history of the Greeks right in two. I knew that that would be a scholar’s book on the face of it. Scholars always read about old nations and destroyed cities, and that book was filled with such records. I was pleased with it. I also picked up, in the salvage rooms, a three-volume edition of “The Cottage Bible,” two volumes of which were without covers, and one of them had most of the leaves stained as if it had been in a fire somewhere. It was an edition printed somewhere near the beginning of the nineteenth century. I bought that, first, because it was a three-volume edition on one subject; it was ponderous. Scholars always had such books. I also bought it because it had so many notes in it. Half of each page was covered with them in fine print. To me, that was the highest type of intellectual book.

I later added to the collection--a thrilling find--a well-bound copy of a civil trial, in Boston, with every word stenographically recorded, and interesting to me because Paul Revere was one of the witnesses, the ORIGINAL Paul Revere that you read of in the school books and see advertised on coffee and cigars! I wondered how such a valuable work had ever passed the book collectors who paid thousands for such prizes! I bought it in much trembling, lest the second-hand shopkeeper should be aware of the book’s real value and not let me have it for ten cents! Perhaps there might be an old document hidden in its yellow leaves! It was with such high, romantic feelings that I made the purchase, and hurried from the shop as swiftly as I could.

The book-buying, once established, kept with me persistently, and crowded out for a time the more material pleasures of pork pies, cream puffs, and hot beef teas. I turned nearly all my spending money into books. One Saturday afternoon, for the first time, I went into a large city bookstore where they always had at the door a barrel of whale-ship wood for fireplaces. I scouted through the shop for bargains, and besides sundry purchases of penny reproductions of famous paintings, I secured Sarah K. Bolton’s “Poor Boys who became Famous,” marked down to fifty cents.

My next purchases at the bookstore were a manilla-covered copy of Guizot’s “History of France,” “Life of Calvin,” a fifty-cent copy of the Koran which I purchased because it was an oriental book like the “Arabian Nights,” and on account of the thrilling legends and superstitions with which Sale has filled a copious Addenda. I also bought a fifteen-cent copy of Spurgeon’s “Plow Talks,” and a ten-cent pamphlet of “Anecdotes for Ministers,” because I reasoned that ministers always had good stories in their sermons--ergo, why not get a source-book for myself, and be equal with the ministers?

Week by week my stock of books grew, each volume probably wondering why it ever became mixed in such strange company. I bought no fiction, now. That was left behind with dime novels and “Boy’s Books!” I was aiming for REAL scholarship now, and I might fit myself for college. I had a great longing now to align my tastes with those that I imagined would be the tastes of real scholars. From “Poor Boys who became Famous” I learned that some of the heroes therein depicted had the habit of reading any massive work they laid their fingers on, of borrowing GOOD books, almost without regard to the subject. Good reading seemed to be the standard, and to that standard I tried to conform. I went into the shop of an Englishman who sold things at auction, and, among his shelves, I found a calfskin-bound “Cruden’s Concordance of the Bible,” which, I found on examination, contained the “Memoirs” of the author. That must be good reading, I judged. Any man who could compile such a mass of references must be dry enough to be a scholar. So I paid twenty-five cents for the book immediately. The same evening I also secured two volumes of Hume’s “History of England,” printed, so the Roman numerals told me, after I had laboriously sought out their meaning, before the end of the eighteenth century, and with the long “s” and very peculiar type. One of the volumes had a cover missing. Though the history did not begin until the later kings, I had the satisfaction of knowing that at least I had a Good history on my list.

Of a technical and necessary nature, I had two well-worn, and very old, arithmetics which I bought for two cents, and Binney’s “Compend of Theology,” which gave a simple and dogmatic summary of Protestant doctrine from the standpoint of Methodism. To complete my scholarly equipment, I knew that I ought to keep a journal of my doings, as every biography that I read mentioned one. So I bought a small pocket diary for that year. My library was complete.

In my reading of biography, I noted that a scholar or a student had his books in cases and that he had a study. I resolved to display my books in a study, likewise. The only available place in the house was a large front room, which my aunt kept closed because there was no furniture for it. The floors were carpetless and lined with tacks left by the last occupant in tearing up the carpet. The wall-paper was dim with dust, and the windows had the shutters drawn because there were no curtains for them. During the day the light filtered dismally through the blinds.

I asked my aunt if I might use that to study in, and she said that “it wasn’t any fret of hers.” I could. So I placed a bedroom chair, and secured a small, second-hand writing-desk, and placed them in the room. I used the white mantel-shelf for my books. I placed them lovingly on end, and according to color, and they seemed magnificent to me--my first library! I would stand before them, in proud contemplation, and whisper to myself, “My own books!”

I have read that in the midst of the rough ocean there are quiet, calm places where a storm-driven ship may ride at peaceful anchor. That dingy room, with its pathetic row of dingy, obsolete books, its bedroom chair and small desk, with the accumulated dust on the bare floor, was such a place for me.

My first duty after supper was to insert a comment in my diary. Many times I would leave the table with aunt and uncle in violent controversy, with one or another of them intoxicated and helpless, and the line would be, in significant red ink, “Dark To-day!” It was “Dark To-day,” and “Dark To-day” for weeks and months. There were few occasions to ever write, “Had a good day, to-day” which, being interpreted, always meant, “Aunt and uncle are not drinking now and are living together without rows!” For I always condensed my diary record, for I thought, “It might be read--some day. Who knows? You’d better not be too definite!”

I ceased to go out at night now, for I was determined “to make something of myself,” now that I had read “Poor Boys who became Famous.” What they had done, I might do. They had gone through hardships. I could go through mine, if only I was not so weak in body.

One night my aunt severely arraigned me for something I had not said. She heaped her significant phrases on my head, taunted me, and aroused in me the murderer’s passion. I immediately ran to my “study,” closed the door, and received consolation from “Poor Boys who became Famous” by finding that they had attained fame through patience. I resolved to bear with fortitude the things that were set in my way.

It was a very elaborate, systematic, and commendable system of self-improvement that I laid out for myself, chiefly at the suggestion of a writer in “Success Magazine,” which I was reading with avidity. “A few minutes a day, on a street-car, at a spare moment, indulged in some good book, have been sufficient to broadly train many men who otherwise would NEVER have reached the pinnacle of fame,” it read, and, acting on that hint, I resolved to get at least a few minutes a day with my own great books. I would not be narrow, but would read in them all every evening! I would read law, theology, history, biography, and study grammar and arithmetic!

So my procedure would be this: After my entry in the diary, I would read a page from “The Life of Calvin,” then one of the romantic legends from the appendix to the Koran, always, of course, after I had dutifully read one of the chapters on “The Ant,” “Al Hejr,” “Thunder,” “The Troops,” “The Genii” or an equally exciting title like the “Cleaving Asunder,” the context of which, however, was generally very dull and undramatic. After the Koran I would pass to “The History of The Ancient World” and try to memorize a list of the islands of the Grecian group before the power of Hellas waned. By this time, though, I was usually unfit to proceed, save as I went into the kitchen and sprinkled water on my burning forehead; dizzy spells and weakness of the eyes would seize hold of me, and I would have to pause in utter dejection and think how grand it must be to be in college where one did not have to work ten and a half hours in a vitiated atmosphere, doing hard labor, before one sat down to study. Sometimes I would say: “No wonder college people get ahead so well--they have the chance. What’s the use of trying?” And at that dangerous moment of doubt, “Poor Boys who became Famous” would loom so large that I would renew my ambitions, and sit down once more to finish my study.

The grammar and the arithmetic I studied in the mill during any minute that I could snatch from my work. I needed help on those subjects, and I could ask questions of the College Graduate Scrubber. Sometimes I would vary the order, and read the theological definitions from “Cruden’s Concordance,” or the scriptural proofs of great doctrines in “The Biblical Theology,” with a page or two from the law trial in which “Paul Revere” had a part.

Whenever I managed to get in a good night of study without suffering in doing it, I would try to astonish the College Graduate Scrubber with a parade of what I had memorized. I would get him at a moment when he was especially indulgent with his time and say:

“Did you ever read in the Koran about that legend of Abraham, when he saw the stars for the first time and thought about there being one God?” And the Scrubber would look at me in astonishment and confess, “I never read that book. What is it?” “Why, didn’t you have it to read in college?” I would ask in amaze. “It’s the Turk’s Bible, and has the word ‘God’ in it the most times you ever saw!”

“They don’t read that in college,” he would answer. One day, when I was asking him to name over the islands of Greece, with their ancient names--to memorize which I had been working for some time--he lifted up his mop, made a dab at my bare legs, and stormed, “Sonny, you’re too fresh. Get away from here.” Seeing that he did not seem especially sympathetic towards my ambitious effort to be “learned,” I let him alone, consoling myself with the thought, “Well, how can you expect a college graduate to bother with you? Mind your own affairs, and some day you might get to college.”

The gang noticed my defection that winter and asked me what was wrong.

“I’m trying to educate myself,” I said. “Yellow Belly” sniffed, and called contemptuously: “Say, fellows! he’s got the book-bats, Priddy has.”

“Well,” I contended, “you fellows can hang around this drug-store corner from now till doomsday, if you want. I want to learn enough to get out of the mill. Besides, it’s none of your business what I do, anyway!” and with that fling I had to run off to escape the stones that were hurled at me.

Chapter XVI. How the Superintendent Shut Us out from Eden

Chapter XVI. How the Superintendent Shut Us out from Eden

The numerous quarrels in which my foster parents indulged, and during which my aunt was not averse to proclaiming loudly from the open windows insulting comments on her neighbors, finally brought a lawyer’s letter to the house in which we were living, summarily ordering us to remove ourselves from the neighborhood. Aunt flew into a passion when the letter was read, and had all manner of sharp criticism for “neighbors who don’t tend to their own faults.” Uncle bowed his head for shame, while I went to my study, shut the door, and prayed through tears that God would, in some way, give me a good home like many another boy, and that He might make aunt and uncle more respectable.

Under the shock of this notice my uncle gave up his work, and said that he was determined to make a new start in some other place.

“I’m going to see, Millie,” he said, “if I can’t get somewhere to work, in God’s world, where there aren’t saloons to tempt us. I’ll send for you as soon as I find a place like that.”

Word soon came from him telling me to give up my work; that he had secured a place in a Connecticut cotton-mill. His letter also stated that we should live in a quiet little village where there were no saloons permitted by the corporation, and that our home would be in a little brick cottage with a flower bed and lawn inside the front gate!

“What a god-send this will prove,” said Aunt Millie, “to get away from the saloons. Maybe Stanwood’ll keep sober now. Let us hope so!”

So at seventeen years of age I went with my aunt and uncle to the village, a strange, quiet place after the rumble and confusion of the city. It was well into spring when we arrived, and we found the village beautiful with restful green grass and the fruit-tree blossoms.

As soon as we arrived my uncle took us to the corporation boarding-house, a dismal brick structure, like a mill, with a yellow verandah on its face. “We’ll have to put up here till the furniture comes,” announced uncle.

The next morning I took my overalls with me and began work in the mule-room. It was a pleasant place when contrasted with the places I had worked in in the city. The overseer did not urge us on so strenuously. There was not that terrible line of unemployed in the alley every morning, waiting to take our places.

I was given a place with my uncle, and, when I had my work in hand, that first day, he would call me into the mule alley and chat with me about our new prospects.

“We’ll begin all over, Al, and see if we can’t do better by you. Maybe we’ll be able to send you to school, if we can get some money laid by. This is our chance. We’re away from drink. The corporation owns the village and won’t allow a saloon in it. Now I can straighten up and be a man at last, something I’ve shamefully missed being the last few years, lad!”

Those first few days of our life in the village, uncle’s face seemed to lose some of its former sad tenseness.

“Wait till the furniture gets here, lad,” he said, repeatedly. “Then we’ll settle down to be somebody, as we used to be.”

Then the day that a postal came from the freight office saying that the furniture had arrived, the superintendent of the mill called my uncle away from his mules for a long consultation. Then he came back in company, with my uncle, and mentioned to me that he would like to see and speak with me in the elevator room. I had only time to note that uncle’s face was that of a man who has just seen a tragedy. It was bloodless, and aged, as if he had lost hope.

What could all this mean? A mill superintendent did not usually consult with his hands except on very grave matters.

I found the superintendent waiting for me, with a very sober face. We had strict privacy. When he had shut the door, he said: “Al Priddy, I want to ask you what will seem, at first, a very impertinent and delicate question. You must give me a frank answer, even though it is very hard.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering what it was to be.

“Al,” he said, sternly, like a judge, “is your aunt a regular drinker--of intoxicants?”

So that was the question! I gasped, choked, and with my eyes on the floor, confessed, “She is, sir.”

“Well,” said the superintendent, “I am very sorry for you, my boy! I am sorry that you have to suffer because of other people. We cannot allow women who drink to live in our houses. We will not allow it if we know about it.”

“But my aunt won’t drink here,” I said. “She said so, and there aren’t any saloons, sir. That is the reason we came out this way!”

“Your aunt has been seen drunk in the village already!” announced the superintendent. “What do you think about that?”

The bottom went out of the fairy world we had hoped to live in, with that news. I could only stand there, dazed, shocked, wild with the sense of our loss.

“You cannot have the house I promised,” said the superintendent. “I have told your uncle that. The furniture is not unloaded yet, and it must return. We will cover the expenses. We cannot permit the other women to suffer because of your aunt. She obtained liquor in some way and I shall look into it. You must go back. You cannot have any of our rents.”

“But, sir,” I pleaded, “won’t you give us a chance. My uncle wants to do well, and we will try and see that my aunt keeps straight too. When we get settled, she’ll change. It’s our only chance. If we go back to the city it will be as bad as before, and that was bad enough. Give us one more chance!”

“But your aunt has managed to get drunk already, after having been in town only a few days. What will it be later?”

“Oh, sir,” I went on, desperate at the chance that was slipping from us, “you are a member of the church and believe in forgiving as Christ did. Won’t you give us a chance to straighten out? It might take time, but it means so much to aunt and uncle and--and me!”

“I shall have to refuse,” said the superintendent finally. “I have to think of the welfare of more families than one. Go back to your work now, and talk things over with your uncle. I will see him again.”

I went back to my uncle and found him doing his work in a dreamy, discouraged way. The miserable hours of the morning wore on, and by noon there was no change in the unfortunate and gloomy situation in which we found ourselves.

When we had had dinner at the boarding-house, uncle went to his room and informed Aunt Millie of what had transpired. Then he upbraided her, scolded her, and called her all manner of brutal names, because he was crazed with shame. My aunt did not cry out, but merely hurried from the room and did not return while we were there.

In the afternoon the superintendent came and had a conference with uncle, the upshot of which was that uncle persuaded him to allow us to retain our work if we could find a house to rent that was not owned by the corporation. The overseer, consulted, said that there was a tenement of three rooms on the outskirts of the village which we might get, and with this prospect, uncle and I found the tragedy of our situation decreasing.

“We’ll go right after supper and look up that place,” agreed Uncle Stanwood. “We might be lucky enough to get it, Al.”

We did not find Aunt Millie at the boarding-house when we arrived, so we ate our meal together, wondering where she could be and fretting about her. But after supper we took an electric car that went past the tenement we were thinking of examining. The car was crowded with mill-workers going to the city for the evening. Uncle and I had to stand on the rear platform.

The village had been left, and the car was humming along a level stretch of state highway bordered with cheerful fields, when our ears were startled by screams, and when uncle and I looked, as did the other passengers, we beheld a woman wildly fleeing through the field toward the river. She was screaming and waving her hands wildly in the air.

“My God!” shouted uncle, “it’s Millie!” He shouted to the conductor, “Stop, quick, I’ll look after her!” and when the car slowed down we both leaped to earth and ran, a race of death, after the crazed woman.

We caught her almost near the brink of the river, and found it difficult to keep her from running forward to hurl herself in it. She was bent on suicide. But finally we calmed her, and found that she had been drinking whisky, which always so affected her, that the prospect of having to return to the city, the thought of having shamed us, had made her determine on suicide.

She did up her hair, straightened her clothes, and we three went further down the road, as far as the house we were seeking, examined the three rooms, and were fortunate enough to rent them. I came away with a light heart, for we would not have to leave the village after all.

Chapter XVII. I Founded the Priddy Historical Club

Chapter XVII. I Founded the Priddy Historical Club

One of the important items we had overlooked in securing the tenement at the border of the village was a saloon which stood next door to it! A saloon, too, that was the common resort of the village, because it stood outside the town lines! “Never mind, lad,” said my uncle, “we’ll struggle on in spite of it, you see. If only your aunt didn’t have it under her nose all day! It’ll be hard for her!” But there it was and matters could not be changed.

The first few weeks passed and found my aunt and uncle solidly entrenched behind strong temperance resolutions.

With this in mind, I began to enjoy my new situation. I made the acquaintance of a cloth designer, a young Englishman who loved books and talked familiarly and intelligently about ambition. He stimulated me to “make something of myself,” when I unfolded my ambition toward that goal. We had long walks at night and on Sundays, and I learned for the first time the joys of sympathetic friendship.

I became a regular attendant at the village church. Indeed, my whole life seemed washed of its grimy contact among the peace and simplicity of village life. To go from week to week and not see cheapness and vulgarity in the profusion I had been face to face with in the city, was dream-like and delightful. Now I seemed to be on the way toward the finer things of life.

I responded to my opportunity in a very definite and practical way. I founded an historical society! In my reading, I had picked up during a holiday in the city a history of the region, a history whose background was the romantic one of Indian lore and fascinating to me. I spoke enthusiastically to the cloth designer about it; he and I secured the interest of three or four other youths, and we resolved thereupon to establish an historical society, with regular, stated meetings, and lectures, real lectures!

The work in the mill with such a definite thing in mind as an historical society became less and less irksome. For the first time, I could master my duties and enjoy pleasant surroundings. I found humane conditions for the first time, and was better in mind and body because of them. In the mill we talked over the society, and resolved, finally, to call it the Priddy Historical Club. It was formally voted, too, that I should go into the city, seek out the author of the ponderous history we had read, and ask him if he would not come out and lecture to us and start the club.

To see a real, live author and talk to him! What a task for me! How I was growing in the finer things. If only the College Graduate Scrubber could know that! It was a vast task, loaded with honor, and truly symbolical of my new intellectual attainments. So I dressed myself in my best clothes, put on a celluloid collar, and went into the city.

The author was a grey-bearded man, who was also librarian of the city library. I found him in his private office, where he listened graciously to the plans of the Priddy Historical Club. He consented to come out and address us, and also said that he would typewrite a course of historical research for our use!

The author met us, one evening, in a room of the church. He told us fascinating tales of early settlers, and left in our possession typewritten sheets filled with a well-planned and complete course of study. That was the first and only meeting of the club. The fellows lost interest at the formidableness of the program, the cloth designer had too much work to bother reading on so large a scale, and I--I had other things of great moment to bother about.

In the middle of summer, a farmer across the way asked me to work for him, and though the wages were much smaller than I earned in the mill, and my aunt at first was loath to have me accept, I began work on the farm. My uncle was greatly pleased with this arrangement.

“Thank God, you have a chance to get some color in your cheeks,” he said, and aunt laughed. “It would be a good sight to have him put a few pounds of flesh on his bones, wouldn’t it?”

At last I was out of the mill, out in the fresh air all day! I stretched my arms, ran, leaped, and worked with great delight. I felt better, stronger, more inspired than ever to get ahead. But when I went home, after the day’s work, I was so sleepy through exposure that I could no longer study. “Never mind,” I thought; “if I only get a strong body out of it, it will be all right.”

So I milked cows, delivered milk to a village three miles distant, and worked about the place, all with hearty good will. Every day I would look in a glass to see if my cheeks were puffing out or getting ruddy.

On Sunday I attended the village church and worshiped near the superintendent of the mill. I shared the farmer’s pew, and though the beat of air and sun on my eyes made me very sleepy when in a room, and though the minister must have wondered why I winked so laboriously during the service, as I tried to keep awake, I always brought to mind the pleasant places into which I had been led, and joined with the minister in a sincere prayer to the God who was leading me.

But one night I went home, and, as I neared the house, I heard hysterical screams and ran as fast as I could, knowing full well what I should see. My aunt was squirming on the floor, her hair undone, and her hat entangled in it. She had on her best dress. Her face was convulsive with hate, with intense insanity. She was shrieking: “Oh, he’s killing me, killing me! Help! Murder!” I ran to her, caught the sickening odor of whisky from her lips and on examination found that there was a gash on her cheek. Then I stood up and looked around. Uncle, breathing heavily, sat at the other end of the table, before an untasted supper. His face was very stern and troubled.

“What have you done?” I shouted. “You’ve been hitting her, you coward!”

“I had to--to protect myself,” he muttered. Then he showed me his face. The blood was dropping down when he took his handkerchief from it, and there was a gash in his temple.

“She threw a saucer square at me,” he explained, in a low voice. “She had a table knife, and she’s stronger than I am, so I just had to smash her with that,” and he pointed to a stick of wood. “It saved her from murder, Al. I’m going away. It will maybe bring her round. If I stayed, she’d raise all sorts of rows and maybe get me to drinking again. She’s been out to that rum shop. I found her, when I got home, dressed as she is, trying to warm a can of soup in the frying-pan. She tried to say she hadn’t been drinking, and then we had the row, lad. Get her to bed, if you can. Get her out of the way, because when she sees me she’s sure to begin it all over. I can’t stop here, can I?”

“No, get away,” I said; “we’ve had rows enough. Send us some, money when you get work, and it’ll be all right. Come and see us, if you get a good place. We might move away from here.”

He packed his bundle, and went to the city on the next trolley-car, and left me alone to fight the matter through. I was earning four and a half dollars a week, and knew that we would have to fight hard if uncle did not send us any money. After I had placed my aunt in bed and left her to manage as best she could, knowing that her sobs would die down and a deep sleep ensue, I went out on the front step and sat down to think matters over.

“Now everybody in the village, the designer, and all your fine friends will know that your aunt drinks,” I thought. “What’s the use trying to be somebody and have these miserable things in the way!” How were we to get through the winter? It seemed inevitable that I should have to go back to the mill. The mill was bound to get me, in the long run. It was only playing with me in letting me out in the sun, the fresh air, and the fields for a while. The mill owned me. I would have to go back!

We tried to live through the winter, without getting word from my uncle, on the money I earned. Occasionally aunt would take some liquor, but she seemed to realize at last that she must not indulge overmuch. One day, growing desperate, I said to her, “If I catch you drinking on my money, now, I’ll leave home, you see! I’ll earn money to buy food, but I won’t earn it for no saloon-keeper, mark my words!” I was only then beginning to see the light in which my own, personal rights to freedom stood. My aunt scolded me for awhile at such unheard of rebellion and such masterly impudence, but she took notice of my earnestness and knew that I would keep my word.

Finally the struggle became too much for us. We saw that we could not starve longer on the little wage I was earning, so we made plans to return to the city where the mills were plenty and where I might earn more money. My aunt was only too eager to get away from a place where it was impossible to hide one’s actions.

A card came from my uncle announcing that he had returned to New Bedford already, and asking us to come and join him.

“Yes,” smiled my aunt, “I’ll bet he’s thinking of his stomach. He finds, when he’s away, that it isn’t every lodging-house keeper that can cook potato pies and things as tasty as his own wife. That’s what he’s homesick for, I’ll bet. Write him that we’ll be on hand. He means all right, but I’ll guarantee he’s half starved.”

I eagerly accepted the privilege of running ahead to New Bedford to rent a tenement. I said to myself, “Yes, and I’ll get one so far away from saloons that the temptation will not be under their noses, anyway!”

That was almost an impossible thing. The rents were excessively high in such paradises. I had to compromise by renting a downstairs house on what seemed to be a respectable street. The nearest saloon was five blocks away.

Chapter XVIII. A Venture into Art

Chapter XVIII. A Venture into Art

Once more we took up life in New Bedford, with the thunder of many mills in our ears, and the short year’s sojourn in the Connecticut village so dim a memory that it was almost out of mind immediately under the press of sterner, more disquieting things.

All the foulness of life seemed to be raked up at my feet since I had been in finer, sweeter air. I went back for a few nights to the Point Road Gang. It was composed of the same fellows save that a few of them had gone away from home, one to prison for larceny, another to an insane asylum through excessive cigarette indulgence, and those who were left had obtained some very wise notions from life.

Jakey was one of those who had gone away from home. One night he joined his old comrades. “Now, fellows,” he said, with somewhat of a swagger, “what’s the matter with being sports, eh?” “We are sporty,” announced Bunny.

“Ah, git off the earth, you!” derided Jakey. “Where’s the booze?”

“Uh, we ain’t skeered of that!” retorted Bunny, “are we, fellows?”

To show that they were not afraid of a drink, some of the gang fished up some pennies from their pockets and made a pot of fifteen cents.

“Get a can, somebody,” announced Jakey. “I’ll get the growler for you, with foam on it too.”

A large pail was procured, and Jakey carried it into one of the saloons. We waited for his return, a huddled group standing in a vacant lot where we should not be seen. This was to be the gang’s first official venture into inebriety. When Jakey returned with the can, it was passed around. We stood in a circle, the better to watch one another. There were ten in the circle. Only three of us did not take a drink, for which we were not only duly laughed at, but Jakey heaped all manner of filthy abuse on our heads. But we did not drink.

The gang, under the worldly-wise Jakey’s direction, began, also, to hold “surprise parties” for the girls in the mill. These parties were arranged for Saturday nights. They were extremely shady functions, being mainly an excuse for beer-drinking, kitchen dancing, and general wild sport. The whole affair was based on a birthday, a wedding, an engagement, or a christening. About twenty-five picked couples were usually invited.

After the presentation speech, dancing took place on the boards of the cellar. Then refreshments were passed, and the boys and girls freely indulged. By midnight the party usually attained the proportions of a revel, threaded with obscenity, vulgarity, fights, and wild singing.

The gang had drawn away from the things I cared for. I had now to live my own life, get my own amusements, and make new companionships.

I was working in the mule-room again and this time I was advanced to the post of “doffer.” I had to strip the spindles of the cops of yarn and put new tubes on them for another set of cops. But this work involved the carrying of boxes of yarn on my shoulders, the lifting of a heavy truck, and often unusual speed to keep the mules in my section running. The farm work did not appear to have strengthened me very decidedly. I had to stagger under my loads the same as ever. I wondered how long I should last at that sort of work, for if I could not do that work the overseer would never promote me to a spinner, where I could earn a skilled worker’s wage. I was now near my nineteenth birthday, and I had to be thinking about my future. I wanted to do a man’s work now, in a man’s way, for a man’s wage. I learned with alarm, too, that I was getting past the age when young men enter college, and there I was, without even a common school education! Once more the gloom of the mill settled down on me. The old despair gripped me.

I did find companionship in my ambitions, now that I had left the gang. Pat Carroll, an Irishman, wanted to go to college also. He was far past me in the amount of schooling he had enjoyed, for by patient application to night-school in the winter, he had entered upon High School studies. There was Harry Lea, an Englishman, who was even further advanced than was Pat Carroll. Harry liked big words, and had tongue-tiring sentences of them, which created rare fun whenever he cared to sputter them for us. Harry had a very original mind, did not care much for society, and lived quite a thoughtful life.

These two aided me with knotty problems in arithmetic and grammar. But it was not often that I had time to spend with them now that my work was more strenuous and wearing than before.

Harry was attending a private evening school and invited me to the annual graduation. I asked him if there would be any “style” to it, thereby meaning fancy dress and well-educated, society people.

“Oh,” said Harry, “there will be men in evening dress, swallow tails, you know, and some women who talk nice. If they talk to you, just talk up the weather. Society people are always doing that!”

The graduation was held in one of the lecture halls of the Y. M. C. A. I sat in my place, watching with rapt eyes the speakers, the fluent speakers who had such an education! The principal was a college man. Him I watched with veritable worship. He had reached the goal I craved so eagerly, so vainly to reach. I wondered at the time if he felt bigger than other people because he had a college degree! When the program neared its end, a young man was announced to read an essay, the principal stating that the young man had been studying English but five months, and saying it so emphatically that I thought the reader must be a green Swede, so I marvelled greatly when the fluent diction sounded on my ears, for I did not hear a single sound with a Swedish accent to it!

One Monday morning there was a notice posted in the mill to the effect that an evening school of design would be opened in the Textile School. I inquired about it, and found that I could learn all sorts of artistic designing--wall-paper, book, and cloth, free of tuition. “Here’s my chance,” I thought. “I can learn a trade that will pay well, get me out of the mill, and not be too much of a tax on what little strength the mill has left me.” So I went joyously “up city,” and entered the splendid building used as a Textile College. I enrolled at the office and was assigned to a classroom.

I went to my task joyfully with dreams of future success, for I liked drawing. Had I not traced newspaper pictures ever since I was a small boy? Were not the white-painted walls of the mills I had worked in decorated with cow-boys, rustic pictures, and Indian’s heads, drawn by my pencil?

Three nights a week I walked back and forth to the Textile School, tired, but ambitious to make the most of my great opportunity. Week by week I went through various lessons until I began to design wall-papers with water-color and to make book-cover designs on which I prided myself, and on which my teacher complimented me.

Then my eyes began to weaken under the glare of the lights, and the long strain they had been under during the day, through staring at cotton threads and the fatigue of long hours under the mill lights. My conventionalized leaves and flowers, my water-lily book designs, my tracings for Scotch plaids--all grew hazy, jumpy, distorted, and my brush fell from a weary clutch. In dismal submission I had to give up that ambition. The mill was bound to have me. What was the use of fighting against it?

But now that the direction had been indicated by the Textile School, I thought that I might learn to draw in my spare time, and outside regular classrooms, for just then a Correspondence School agent came to me and offered me instruction in that line at a very reasonable rate. I enrolled myself, and thought that with the choice of my hours of study I could readily learn the art of designing. But a few evenings at elementary scribbling and a few dollars for advance lessons took away my courage. The whole thing seemed a blind leading. I cut off the lessons and gave up in utter despair.

Then, one night, as I was on my way from work, I was met near our house by a young lad who ran up to me, stopped abruptly, almost poked his finger in my eye as he called, derisively: “Aw, yer aunt’s been arrested fer being drunk! She was lugged off in a hurry-up! Aw, yer aunt’s got jugged! Shame on yer! shame on yer!”

I ran home at that, incredulous, but found the house deserted. Then I knew that it was true. I lay on the bed and cried my eyes sore in great misery, with the bottom gone out of the world.

My uncle had been called to investigate the matter. He came home and said that nothing could be done until morning, so we sat up to the table and made out as best we could with a supper.

The next morning I went to uncle’s overseer with a note to the effect that he would be unable to be at work that morning. The mill-boys, who had passed the news around, met me and in indelicate haste referred to my misfortune, saying, “Goin’ to the trial, Priddy,” and, “What did yer have to eat last night, Priddy--tripe on a skewer?” I worked apart that day, as if interdicted from decent society. My aunt’s shame was mine, perhaps in a greater measure.

On my return home that night I found my foster parents awaiting me with smiles on their faces.

“Al,” said my aunt, in tears, “I want you to forgive me. I’ve turned over a new leaf. Both of us have. Uncle and I have been to the city mission and have taken the pledge. The judge wasn’t hard on me. He sent us there. We’ve put you to shame often enough and are sorry for it. You’re to have a better home, and we’ll get along famously after this. Maybe it’s all been for the best, lad; don’t cry.” And from the new, inspiring light in her eyes I could tell that she meant every word, and I thanked God in my heart for the experience that had made such words possible--strange words on my aunt’s lips.

Chapter XIX. A Reduction in Wages, Cart-tail Oratory, a Big Strike, and the Joys and Sufferings thereof

Chapter XIX. A Reduction in Wages, Cart-tail Oratory, a big Strike, and the Joys and Sufferings thereof

In January of that year forty thousand mill operatives went on strike. I belonged to the union and had a voice in the preparations for the strike. The manufacturers wanted to reduce our wages ten per cent. Word was passed around the mule-room that there was to be a stubborn fight, and that every union member ought to be on hand at the next regular meeting, when a vote was to be taken which would be our answer to the officials.

Our union headquarters were then in a long, narrow room in one of the business blocks, lighted by smoky oil lamps. The room was crowded when the meeting was called to order. The men were allowed to declare their feelings in speeches.

“Th’ miserly manufacturers,” growled Hal Linwood, a bow-legged Socialist, “they never knows when they are well off, they dunno. Little enough we gets now, and worse off we’ll be if they slices our wages at the rate they would go. It ain’t just, and never will be just till we div--”

“Order!” shouted the chairman. “This here isn’t no Socialist meeting. What the man said at first is all right, though.”

“Hear! hear!” roared the crowd.

Linwood represented the prevailing opinion, and when the vote was taken we declared in favor of a strike by a large majority. Messengers were coming in from the other meetings, and we saw that a general strike would be effected.

The situation was serious, though, for we were in the heart of winter, the most inconvenient time for a strike.

I looked forward to it without any scruples, for it meant a chance for me to rest. I had been given no vacations either in winter or summer, and I felt that one was certainly due me.

I experienced a guilty feeling when I passed the silent mills the next Monday morning. I felt as if I were breaking some great, authoritative law. It was the same feeling I always experienced when I stayed away from work, even for a day. I always avoided passing the mill for fear the overseer would run out and drag me in to work.

During the early stages of the strike we were constantly in our strike headquarters, getting news and appointing committees. Collectors were sent out to other cities to take up contributions. Mass-meetings were held in the city hall, and we were addressed by Mr. Gompers and other labor leaders. Even in the public parks incendiary meetings were common, and wild-eyed orators called us to resistance--from the tail end of a cart.

The position of collector was eagerly sought, for to most of the men it offered a higher wage than could be earned in the mill. It also meant travel, dinners, and a good percentage of the collections. When I told my uncle that a man named Chad was earning more money as a collector than he could earn as a spinner, I was angrily told to mind my own business.

In fact, the conduct of the strike, as I looked on it from behind the scenes, was simply a political enterprise. Our leader kept urging us to resist. He himself was not working in the mill, but was getting his money from our dues. Several of our meetings were no more than drinking bouts. The strike manager, who conducted our part in it, elected his closest friends to important offices which offered good remuneration.

I have been to football games when the home team knew that it was beaten at the start, and yet the captain has pounded his men and said: “Come on, boys, we’ve got them whipped.” That sort of artificial courage was supplied us by our leaders. Perhaps it was necessary; for the most of us were hungry, our clothes were worn, and the fire at home had to be kept low. The grocers would not give us credit, and the winter was cold. But the leaders grinned at us, pounded the gavel on the table, and shouted: “This is a fight for right, men. We’ve got the right end of the stick. Keep together and we’ll come out all right!”

At one of the meetings, picketing committees were appointed, with specific instructions to do all in their power to prevent “scabs” from going into the mills. We boys were invited to special meetings, where we were treated to tobacco by the men and lectured on the ethics of the “scabbing system.”

“Just think, lads, here are those that would step in and take your work. Think of it! That’s just what they’d do! Take the bread right out of your mouths, and when the strike is done, you wouldn’t have no work at all to go to. It’s criminal, and you mustn’t let it pass. Fight, and fight hard. A ‘scab’s’ not human. Don’t be afraid to fight him by fair means or foul. And then, too, the manufacturers have the police and the judges and the governor on their side, because they are moneyed men! They will try to drive us off the streets so that we can’t show how strong we are. Look out for the ‘scabs’!”

His words came true, in part. The state police were called, several strikers were arrested, and given the full penalty for disorderly conduct and assault. We were not allowed to congregate on the street corners. The police followed every crowd.

These precautions intensified the anger of the strikers. Strike headquarters, in which we could meet and pass the day in social ways, were opened in vacant stores. Here we came in the morning and stayed through the day, playing cards, checkers, and talking over the strike.

In regard to newspapers, there was a prevailing opinion among us that the Boston Journal alone favored our side, so we bought it to the exclusion of all other dailies. Against the Boston Transcript there was a general antipathy. I liked to read it, but my uncle spoke against it.

“I don’t want anybody under my roof reading the paper that is owned hand and foot by our enemies,” he argued, and I saw that I had given him great offense.

The Boston papers sent their official photographers to take our pictures. I posed, along with several of my friends, before our headquarters, and had the pleasure of seeing the picture in the paper under some such caption as “A group of striking back-boys.”

I did not suffer during the strike. I had a splendid time of it. While the snow was on the ground I obtained a position as a sweeper in one of the theaters, and I spent nearly every day for a while at matinées and evening performances. The strike went on into the early part of May, and, when the snow had gone, I went out with a little wagon--picked coal and gathered junk. Through these activities I really earned more spending money than I ever received for working in the mill. I rather enjoyed the situation, and could not understand at the time how people could say they wanted it to end.

Before it did end, the state police withdrew, and we went on guard once more at the mill gates on watch for “strike-breakers.”

We boys made exciting work of this, encouraged by our elders. I recall one little man and his wife, who did not believe in unions or strikes. They did have a greed for money, and they had plenty of it invested in tenements. They had no children to support. They were, however, among the first to try to break the strike in our mill. Popular antipathy broke with direful menace upon their heads. Every night a horde of neighbors--men, women, boys, and girls--escorted them home from their work, and followed them back to the mill gates every morning. The women among us were the most violent. “Big Emily,” a brawny woman, once brought her fist down on the little man’s head with this malediction: “Curse ye! ye robber o’ hones’ men’s food! Curse ye! and may ye come to want, thief!” The poor man had to take the insult, for the flicker of an eye meant a mobbing. His wife was tripped by boys and mud was plastered on her face. The pettiest and the meanest annoyances were devised and ruthlessly carried into effect, while the strike-breaking couple marched with the set of their faces toward home.

Even the walls of their house could not protect them from the menace of the mob. One of the strikers rented the lower floor of their house, and one night, when we had followed them to the gate, he invited us into the basement, produced an accordion, and started a merry dance, which lasted well into the night.

The return of the swallows brought an end to the strike. We boys resolved to vote against a return, for the May days promised joyous outdoor life. But the men and women were broken in spirit and heavily in debt, and a return was voted. We had fought four long months and lost.

Chapter XX. My Steam Cooker goes wrong. I go to Newport for Enlistment on a Training-ship

Chapter XX. My Steam Cooker goes wrong. I go to Newport for Enlistment on a Training-ship

I returned to the mill with the feelings of an escaped convict who has been returned to his cell after a day of freedom. My uncle found that he had been put on the black-list, and consequently would not be able to obtain work in any mill in the city. I was allowed to take up a new position as “doffer.” This meant an advance in wages, but I knew that I was not physically equal to it. There was nothing for me to do, however, but accept, for there was a waiting line at the lower end of the room and the overseer was not a man who offered things twice.

The mill was getting more and more beyond me. It had taken my strength and I was incapable of a man’s work, as a man’s work went in the mule-room. I resolved, then, to break my aunt’s domination, leave the mill, and earn my own way with the first thing that offered itself outside the mill.

About this time I read of a young fellow who earned large profits by selling steam cookers. I wrote to the firm, borrowed five dollars, and obtained a sample and a territory. This cooker consisted of five compartments which fitted in each other like a nest of boxes. The sample was on such a small scale that great care had to be exercised in a demonstration of it. I practised faithfully on it for a few evenings, tried to sell one to my aunt, and then resolved to take a day’s holiday and attempt a few sales. One cooker would yield a good day’s pay. I resolved to abide by instructions and persevere.

So I started out one afternoon, full of hope, assured that the cooker would sell on sight and that my way out of the mill had come. I did not then think that personal appearance had everything to do with successful salesmanship. I did not stop to think that a tall, bony, red-eyed youth, with a front tooth missing and wearing trousers which bagged at the knees, whose coat-sleeves were just high enough to show that he had never worn a pair of cuffs in his life--I did not stop to think that he would invite laughter and ridicule on his head. I faced the situation seriously and earnestly, and I expected the same consideration from the world.

I walked cheerfully to a wealthy portion of the town, in a district where I was certain they would like to see my wonderful steam cooker. In great, gulping patience I waited for an answer to my ring before a very aristocratic house. I arranged my “patter” and determined that everything should go on smoothly so far as my talent was concerned.

The lady of the house appeared and I stated my business. She did not invite me into her house. I exposed my wonderful machine, pulled it apart, explained how she could cook cabbages, puddings, and meats at one and the same time. I expatiated on the superiority of steam-cooked foods, and implied that she could not intelligently keep house and maintain a reputation as a cook unless she used the steam cooker. She bore my “patter” with great patience, and must have smiled at my cockney dialect, of which I was blissfully ignorant.

I had reached that part of the demonstration where the several sections had to be fitted into each other, and had put the first two sections in place and told what foods could be cooked in them, when I came to grief at the third section. It stuck, and in spite of the beads of perspiration which rolled down my face and a vain attempt to keep up the “patter,” I could not unfasten it until I had turned the wonderful cooker upside down, a proceeding which would have emptied the beans and puddings in practical use. The woman was very kindly, and she dismissed me with cordial words. But I went down those steps chagrined and fully persuaded that I must stay in the mill.

My uncle was now earning his living by keeping another store. He and my aunt were spending the profits in a next-door saloon. My home life had not improved.

Then I remembered the novels I had read; some of them, an “Army and Navy Series,” had told of apprentice life in the navy. I knew that Newport was the recruiting station, and I resolved to enlist.

When I proposed the matter to my aunt, she agreed to let me go. The following morning I obtained a day’s holiday and went on the electric cars to the noted seaport town.

This trip abroad, with its opportunities to see that there were people who did other things besides work in the mill, and with its freedom and sunshine, made me more desperate than ever to leave the mill. I was like the Pilgrim in the first chapter of Bunyan’s allegory, running from the City of Destruction, fingers in ears, calling “Life, Life!”

I walked around Newport cliffs and touched the gateways of the palaces which front the famous walk. I reveled in the shimmer of the sea and the fragrance of shrubs and flowers. This was life and the world! I must get out in it; take my place daily in it, and live the life of a Man. God made the sun and the fragrant air; he made the flowers and created health. That was due me, because it was not my sin, but that of my elders, which had shut me out of it through my boyhood. These were some of the thoughts uppermost in my mind. I walked the narrow streets and broad avenues--places which I had read of and had never hoped to see. If I had to return to the mill, I could say that I had seen so much of the outside world, at least!

After I had watched the departure of some torpedo-boats in the direction of a gray-fronted fort across the bay, I hurried in the direction of the naval college to see if Uncle Sam would give me the chance to leave the mill which others had denied.

I passed a training-ship with its housed deck. I walked along past drill grounds and barracks and entered a quiet office. With a beating heart I announced to the attendant that I had come to offer myself for enlistment in the training-school. He led me into a large, dim room to a group of uniformed officers. They asked me a few questions, tested me with bits of colored wool, and then I was commanded to disrobe.

The remainder of the examination must have been exceedingly perfunctory, for the scales registered only one hundred and eighteen pounds and I stood five feet eleven inches in my bare feet. That was enough to exclude me, but they went on with the tests, examining my teeth (the front one was missing), pounding my chest, and testing the beat of my heart. No comments were made, and after I had dressed again I was sent to an anteroom and told to wait their decision.

For a few long minutes I sat in the silent room wondering what would be the decision. I was optimistic enough to plan what I would do if I should enter the navy. I should--here the attendant came, offered me a tiny card, and without a word bowed me to the door. I knew then that I had been refused. I walked through the yard in a daze. When I reached the city, I took heart to read the card they had given me. I recall that it read thus simply: “REFUSED. Defective teeth. Cardia--” Uncle Sam did not want to give me a chance!

Chapter XXI. The Ichabod of Mule-rooms, some Drastic Musing, College at my Finger-tips, the Mill People wait to let me pass, and I am Waved into the World by a Blind Woman

Chapter XXI. The Ichabod of Mule-rooms, some Drastic Musing, College at my Finger-tips, the Mill People wait to let me pass, and I am Waved into the World by a Blind Woman

On my return from Newport I went to work in one of the oldest mills in the city. The “mules” were in a gloomy basement--a crowded, dim, and very dirty place to work in. It was the Ichabod of mule-rooms, with every trace of glory gone. The machinery was obsolete and had to be helped along with monkey-wrenches, new parts, and constant, nerve-wearing wearing watchfulness. The alleys were so narrow that the back-boys had to edge in between the frames; and expanded chest often meant a destructive rubbing on bobbins and a breaking of threads. It always seemed to me that this room was reserved by the corporation to work off its veteran spinners and its unreliable ones, its veteran machinery, and its bad-tempered, ineffective bosses. This mule-room was the byword among the spinners at that end of the city. A man hung his head when he had to tell another that he was working in it; for it generally was his testimony to his fellows that he was in the last ditch. Spinners graduated from that room into scrubbing or oiling.

The personnel of this room was always changing; but its prevailing character remained the same: a dull-eyed, drunken set of men, a loafing, vicious set of young fellows who worked a week and loafed three.

I chose to work in that place because it was my first opportunity for an advance from doffing to “joiner.” A “joiner” is one who shares with another the operation of a pair of mules--a semi-spinner. The pay is divided, and the work is portioned off between the two. I had been working toward this position for six years and a half, and now it had come, even in that miserable room, I was eager to see how I should manage.

But, oh, the mockery and vanity of all efforts, even my wild ones, to master one of those machines! The lurching, halting, snapping things could not be mastered. Threads snapped faster than I could fasten them. One tie and two breaks, two ties and three breaks, along the row of glistening spindles, until there were so many broken threads that I had to stop the mule to catch up. And every stop meant the stoppage of wages, and the longer a thread stayed broken, the less I was earning; and on top of that, the bosses swore at us for stopping at all. I should have stopped work then and there--it would have been the sensible thing to do--but I was no loafer, and I was trying to make good in this new work--the end of a long desire. The other “joiners” and spinners did not try to keep at it. They gave up the work as soon as they discovered how useless it was to try to make a decent wage from the worn-out machines. Only myself and a few poor men who were there because they could not get any better place stayed on and fought the one-sided fight. Every time the machinery broke--and breaks were constant--the machinist grumbled, and took his own time in coming with his wrenches.

The physical and mental reaction of all this upon me was most woeful. My muscles grew numb under the excessive pressure on them, so much so that I often stood still when the threads were snapping about me and looked on them as if I had never seen a broken thread before. Or I would suddenly stop in my wild dashes this way and that in the mending of threads and look dazedly about, feel a stifling half-sob coming to my throat, and my lips would tremble under the misery and hopelessness of it all. My only consolation, and very poor, too, lay in the clock. At six o’clock it would all end for a few hours at least, and I could get out of it all. But when you watch the clock under those circumstances, an hour becomes two, and one day two days. So the labor was, after all, a wild frenzy, a race and a stab and a sob for ten and a half hours! I can never think of it as anything more.

Some of my work-fellows in that room were sent to jail for assault, petty thieving, and drunkenness. I used to think about them, in the jail, doing light work under healthy conditions, even though they were paying penalties for lawlessness, but I, who had done no crime, had to have ten hours and a half of that despairing contest with a machine. How much better to be sewing overalls or making brooms in a jail! I had to stay in the house at night in order to be thoroughly rested for the next day’s work. I had no liberty.

And, added to all this, there was the constant depressive contact with unsympathetic and foul-mouthed desecrators of ambition. Those who knew me in that room were aware that I was trying to avoid every degenerative and impure act. Some of them passed word around also that I was attending such and such a church! They came to the end of the mule, when the boss chanced not to be around, and, in a huddled group, stood at my elbows, where I had work to do, and put on their dirty lips the foulest vocabulary that ever stained foul air.

Then one day there came a flash which clearly lighted up everything. “Why are you going through this wild, unequal labor in this dull room day by day! Why? Do you absolutely have to do it? Are others keeping at it, as you? Why, why, why?” each one bigger than its fellow, made me meet every fact squarely. “To what end all this?”

My labor was helping to buy beer at home! I was giving up all my wage to my aunt, and getting back a little spending money. I had fifteen cents in the bank at the time. I did not have to overstrain myself as I was doing. I had the privilege of giving up my work at any moment I chose. I was no slave to such conditions. No man could drive me to such tasks. Giving up the work only meant a scolding from my aunt and a little going about among other mills to find another, and perhaps better, position. This was a new thought to me--that I could leave my work when I wanted; that I might be given work too hard for me.

Previously I had worked on the supposition that whatever was given me ought to be done at all costs; that the mill was the measure of a man, and not man the measure of the mill. I had always looked upon my work as a test of my moral capacity; that any refusal to work, even when it was harder than I could bear, was a denial of my moral rights. But now the worm of conscience was boring through me. Why should I, at twenty years of age, not be entitled to what I earned, to spend on my education, instead of its being spent on my aunt’s appetite for intoxicants?

Then, too, why should I have to work with people who had no moral or mental sympathy with me? Was five dollars and seventy-five cents, my pay for the first week in that gloomy room, worth it? Assuredly not.

But, then, what could I do outside of the mill? I had done nothing else but work in the mill and spend a little time on a farm. If I left the mill at so late a time, left all the technical knowledge I had gathered while I had been going through it, should I be doing the best thing for my future? There seemed nothing in the future from the mill, for, as I have shown, I had not the strength to cope with more difficult tasks than those that then faced me. Probably if I got out of doors, in some open-air work, I should gain strength and be able to make progress in some other line of work. But I had been trying for that, and nothing had come. What then?

Then the greatest light of all came--flooded me. Leave the mill at any cost! Stop right where I was; quibble no more, offend all, risk all, but get away from the mill! It was all so simple after all! Why had I not worked it out before? Leave home! Have all I earned to save for my education! That was my emancipation proclamation, and I started to follow it.

First of all, I went to the overseer in that dingy room and told him frankly that the work he had given me to do was too hard for me. I could not keep it up. I also told him I did not care to leave just then, but, if he had any easier work in the room--doffing, for instance--I should like to continue. He did not receive this declaration with any expression of reproach, as I had expected, but said simply: “You go to work back-boying on those first three mules. You’ll make as much money by it as at anything in here.”

This first break made, how easily all others followed, as if they had been waiting around all the time! It was just at this time that I met a young fellow who had come back to the city to spend his vacation from study at a university in the Middle West. To him I told all my thoughts concerning getting away from the mill. I said: “I wonder if I went out where you go to college, and worked at something for a time, just to be away from mills, whether in time I might not have money enough on hand to be able to start on my way towards an education?”

“How much do you think you would have to save?” he asked, smilingly.

“Why--why, hundreds of dollars, isn’t it?”

“Do you think so, Al?”

“Why, certainly.”

“And how long would you work to save up?”

“Oh,” I replied, “that depends upon what I get to do and how much I could put by.”

“Suppose, Al, that you could go right out and start right in with school at the university--it has a preparatory course--and work your way along, what would you say?”

“You mean, jump right in now, this year?”

He nodded.

“But it’s all I can do to board and clothe myself by working hard in the mill. I couldn’t by any means work hard enough to pay for going through a school.”

“How much would you be willing to--oh, Al, you’re all wrong about the cost. I tell you, old fellow, you can get through a year at my place on a hundred dollars: board, tuition--”

“What’s that?”

“Teaching and room and heat. All the rest of your expenses won’t amount to over fifty dollars, if you’re careful.”

I gazed on him, open-mouthed, for I thought he was laughing at me.

“Say--you aren’t kidding me, are you? All that is straight--about being so--so cheap?”

“Why, yes, it’s all true enough. I think you can manage it too, Al. I’ll do my best to speak a word for you. Get ready to go in three weeks, no matter how much money you have. I think you’ll be able to get some outside work to do at the university, to work your way through and meet expenses.”

“Well,” I said, “I sha’n’t be sorry even if I don’t get a chance at the school for a while, you know. If I could only get something to do near there, my chance might come later. I shouldn’t be any worse off than I am here. I can earn my living at something, don’t you think so?”

“Why, yes, I do; but I think you will have a chance at the school without having to wait.”

“Oh, I can hardly believe that,” I exclaimed for sheer joy.

“But you can make all your plans for it, just the same,” said my friend with confidence.

This new outlook set every strong emotion shouting in me. The world was not dressed in so gray a garb as I had thought. I went home and told my aunt about my new plan. She said:

“You’ve never asked me if you could go!”

“Well, no,” I said, “I haven’t; and I don’t think I need to. I mean to set out for myself, at any rate. It’s about time now that I was doing something for myself, don’t you think so?”

“I think you’re an impudent puppy, that’s what!” indignantly cried my aunt.

I told Pat and Harry, and they could hardly believe their own ears; but they urged me to take the chance, for they thought it was a “chance.”

My work--all work in the mill--had suddenly taken on a temporary aspect now, a means to a great end and not an end in itself. I could look on it now and feel that I had mastered it at last. The throbbing, jubilant shout of the victor was on my lips now. I saw past those lint-laden rooms, the creaking, whirling pulleys, and the clacking belts; past them, and everything that the mill meant to me; to a very pleasant new life ahead; one whose ground was holy and on which it was the privilege of but few to walk. I think there must have been a complete effacement of all the lines that had marked my face. For once, I felt sure of myself; sure that all the lines of leading were to mass into one sure road toward a better thing.

My mind was not on my work for the following three weeks. I went about with a dream in my eyes. I know I whistled much and began to lose all respect for those machines which had driven me, in times past, like a chained slave. I even found myself having much pity for all the other men and boys in the mill. I went among them with hesitation, as if I had a secret which, if told, would make them feel like doing what I was about to do.

I had found out from a ticket agency in the city that my fare to the Middle West would cost approximately seventeen dollars. I knew that in two weeks, with the week’s wage that the mill always kept back and with the seven dollars my Uncle Stanwood had promised to let me have, that I should have my railway fare and incidental expenses, anyway. So there, in the ticket agency, I had the clerk take me, with his pencil, over the route I should later take in the cars. It was a wonderful itinerary. I was to see the mountains of New England, the lakes of the border, and to plunge into a new part of the country! It would take me three days. How I stared at the prospect of so much traveling! I obtained time-tables with maps containing the route over the different railways I should ride on during that journey away from the mill. Three days from the cotton mills! That was a thought to make a fellow dance all day without rest.

One day I lay sprawled out at full length in an alley behind a box, so that the overseer might not see me, when Micky Darrett peeped over my shoulders at the maps I had spread out on which I had traced and retraced my great journey with a pencil.

“What yer’ doin’, Priddy?” said Micky. “Oh,” I announced with studied nonchalance, “just planning out the road I shall take in two weeks. I’m going to college, you know.”

“Oh,” laughed Micky, “quit yer kiddin’ like that! What are you doin’, really?”

“Just what I said, Micky. I mean it.”

“Gee!” gasped the little Irishman; “yer a sporty bluffer, Priddy!”

“But ’tis true, though,” I insisted.

“What yer givin’?” growled Micky. “It’s only swells goes ter college.”

“That’s what you think, Micky, but it’s God’s truth that I go in two weeks and try to make a start.”

“Gee!” he gasped; “I allus thought you was poor. You must have got a lot of money saved, all right, all right!”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Micky. I shall have about three weeks’ wages and what my uncle gives me--seven dollars--if he gives it to me at all. That’s all I’ve got to start on.”

“Don’t stuff that down me, Priddy!” cried Micky, in great disgust, for he hated to be made sport of. “You can’t bluff yer uncle.”

But nevertheless he published all over the room what I had told him, and thereafter I answered many questions about myself and my plans, and had to spend much energy in rebutting the prevalent suspicion that I was “bluffing the room.”

Then came my last Saturday in the mill--the last day I have ever spent in the mill. I did my work with a great conscience that day. I don’t believe the second hand had to look twice to see if I had done my sweeping well. The spinners had become very friendly, as if my ambition had won respect from them, and even the overseer came to me just before I left the room, took me by the hand, and said: “I wish you the very best of luck, Priddy. Keep to it!”

On Monday morning, at six o’clock, I sat in the train. I had drawn thirteen dollars from the mill, received seven dollars from my uncle, said good-by to my old friends, and paid fifteen dollars and sixty-five cents for a ticket. Aunt Millie, in tears, had kissed me, and had hoped that “I’d do well, very well!” Uncle Stanwood had carried my hand-bag for me to the electric car and had given me good counsel out of his full heart. Now I sat listening to the mill bells and whistles giving their first warning to the workers. “You’ll never call for me again, I hope!” I said to myself as I listened. Then the train started, and I glued my face to the window-pane to catch a last glimpse of the city where for seven years I had been trying to get ahead of machinery and had failed. The train went slowly over the grade crossings. I saw the mill crowds at every street, held back by the gates, waiting deferentially while I, who had been one of them last week, was whirled along towards an education. I saw them as I had walked with them--women in shawls and looking always tired, men in rough clothes and with dirty clay pipes prodded in their mouths, and girls in working aprons, and boys, just as I had been, in overalls and under-shirts. And I was going away from it all, in spite of everything!

One of my friends was an old woman, stone blind. When I had given her my farewell, she had said: “Al, I’ll be at the crossing in front of my house when the train goes by on Monday morning. Look for me. I’ll wave my handkerchief when the train passes, lad, and you’ll know by that sign that I’m sending you off to make something of yourself!”

We came to the outskirts of the city; the mill crowds had been left, and at last a lonely crossing came, the one for which I had been looking. I had the window open. The train was gathering speed, but I saw the black-garbed blind woman, supported by her daughter, standing near the gates, her eyes fixed ahead, and her handkerchief fluttering, fluttering, as we plunged into the country.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: italics.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.