Chapter II: Part 2

Our dark home had a more miserable aspect about it than ever when we got back. “Get right up to bed,” commanded aunt, “there’s no coal to waste. You can keep warm there!” and though her manner of saying it was rough, yet I heard a catch in her voice, and then she burst into tears.

“Never mind, Aunt Millie,” I comforted, “uncle will write, I feel sure!” She looked up, startled, and seemed ashamed that I had found her crying and had struck her thought so.

“Who’s whimpering?” she cried fiercely. “Mind your business!” But I noticed that when she came in my room that night and thought me asleep, when in reality I was keeping my ears open for the carols, she kissed me very tenderly and crept away silently.

When the carols first strike a sleeping ear, one imagines that the far-away choirs of Heaven are tuning up for the next day’s chorus before God. The first notes set such dreams a-spinning as are full of angels and ethereal thoughts. Then the ear becomes aware of time and place, and seizes upon the human note that may be found in Christmas carols when they are sung by mill people at midnight in winter weather. Then the ear begins to distinguish between this voice and that, and to follow the bass that tumbles up and down through the air. Then there is a great crescendo when the singers are right under one’s window, and the words float into the chamber, each one winged with homely, human tenderness and love. So I was awakened by the carol singers that Christmas night. The first tune sung for us was, “Christians Awake,” and when its three verses had awakened us, and we had gone to the window to look down on the group, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” was followed by a soaring adaptation of Coronation. It was a group of about fifteen. There were Old Bill Scroggs with his concertina, Harry Mills with his ’cello, and Erwind Nichols with his flute. Torvey was there, though he could not sing. He carried the lantern, caught the money that was dropped into his hat from the windows, and kept the young men and women from too much chattering as they approached the different stands. When they had finished their anthems, aunt called from the window, “Happy Christmas good folks. It was kind of you to remember us so. It’s real good.” Old Torvey answered back, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Brindin. We must get along.” Then the crowd sent up a confused “Merry Christmas,” and passed on.

Then it was back to bed again to sleep until awakened by an unnatural pounding on our door below. “What is it, aunt?” I cried. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Put on your clothes and get down before they break in the door!” I dressed hurriedly, inserted the massive iron key in the lock, gave it a turn only to have the door thrust open wide by Old Torvey, who cried excitedly, as he waved a letter in the air, “It’s from Hammerica, from him!”

My aunt ran down at that, partly dressed, and screamed in her excitement. With fluttering, nervous fingers she tore open the envelope, and examined the contents in a breathless minute.

“Stanwood sent it,” she laughed, “there’s tickets for America and a money order for five pounds!” and then she gave in to a hysterical relapse which required the calling in of the green-grocer’s wife. It _was_ a Merry Christmas!

_Chapter III. My Schoolmates Teach me American_

_Chapter III. My Schoolmates Teach me American_

It was an extraordinary excuse that Uncle Stanwood gave for his neglect of us. He disposed of the matter by saying, in his Christmas letter, “I was so busy and so hard put to that I had no heart to write till I had gathered enough money to send for you. I know it must have worried you.”

His steamship tickets, however, had suddenly put us in the limelight in the town. “The Brindins are going over!” was the word that passed around. I can imagine no more perfect fame than the United States had gained in the minds of the men and women of our little town. America was conceived as the center of human desire, the pivot of worldly wealth, the mirror of a blissful paradise. If we had fallen heirs to peerages or had been called to Victoria’s court, it is doubtful if more out-and-out respect would have been showered on us than was ours when it was known that we were going to the “States.”

The impression prevailed that in America the shabbiest pauper gets a coat of gold. During the packing, when the neighbors dropped in while Mrs. Girion made a hot brew of porter and passed it around to the visitors and the workers, an America was constructed for us rivaling the most extravagant fairy-tale ever told by Grimm.

“Yis,” chattered Old Scroggs, “they’s wunnerful likely things over theer in Hammerica, I’m told. I heer’s ’at they spends all ther coppers for toffy and such like morsels, havin’ goold a plenty--real goold! Loads o’ it, they saay!”

“That’s so,” put in Maggie, our next-door neighbor. “Everybody has a chance, too. Double wages for very little work. All sorts of apples and good things to eat. Fine roads, too, and everybody on cycles; they’re so cheap out there. They say the sun is always out, too, and not much rain!”

In somebody’s memory there lingered traditions brought from America by a visitor from that country. Besides these traditions, which had to do with “gold,” “paradise,” and “easy work,” there were a half a dozen Yankee words which we dearly loved to prate, as if by so doing we had at least a little fellowship with the wonderful country. In the school-yard my fellows drilled me on these words, Billy Hurd saying, “Now, Al, them Yankees allus talk through the nose, like this,” and he illustrated by a tinpanish, nasal tone that resembled the twang of a tight piano wire. “Now, if you’re going to be American, talk like that, it’s real Yankee. Now let’s see you try the word, ‘Candy,’ which is what they call toffy over there. Only don’t forget to talk through the nose like I did.”

So I dug my hands deep in my pockets, “cocked my jib,” as we called looking pert, and drawled out in most exaggerated form, “Saay, Ha’nt, want tew buy teow cents wuth of kaandy?”

“That’s just like Yankee,” complimented Billy. So I went home, called my aunt’s attention to what I was going to do, and repeated the sentence, much to her delight.

“That’s right, Al,” she said, “learn all the American you can, it will help out when we get there!”

Filled with incidents like these, the days of our English lingering rapidly drew to an end, and every thought in my mind had an ocean steamship at the end of it. The neighbors made it a “time of tender gloom,” for it could be nothing else to a mature person, this taking up of the Brindin family history by the root for transplantation, this breaking off of intimate relationships which, through blood, reached back into misty centuries. Then, too, there was the element of adventure, of risk, for we little knew what prospects were in store for us in that strange land: what would be the measure of our reward for going there. The neighbors were very solemn, but the strange thing about it lay in the fact that there was not one, insular as the British are heralded, who thought that the proposed trip should not be taken!

Finally we came to the farewells and I made mine very concrete. As it was clearly understood that everybody who went to America attained great wealth, I told Clara Chidwick that I would send her a fine gold watch, and when her sister Eline cried with envy, I vowed to send her a diamond brooch. Harry Lomick went off with the promise of five new American dollars, Jimmy Hedding was consoled with the promise of two cases of American “candy,” while Chaddy Ashworth vowed eternal friendship when I promised him a barrel of American apples, and, on the strength of that, as my dearest friend, we mutually promised to marry sisters, to keep house next door to one another when we grew up, and to share whatever good fortune might come to us in the shape of money!

Quite a body-guard of friends saw us off at the station. “Good luck to you!” was the prevailing cry, as we sat in our compartment waiting for the train to start for Liverpool. Then the guard shouted, “All aboard!” and we were in the first, exciting stage of our great adventure.

I settled myself back against the leather back of the seat wondering why my aunt was crying so, and then I began to count the pennies with which I planned to purchase some oranges in Liverpool.

Our night in Liverpool, our last night on English soil, is summed up in a memory of a cheap hotel, a stuffy room, and a breakfast on an uncountable number of hard-boiled eggs. In the morning, early, we left that place and were taken on a tram-car to the dock. There I did purchase some oranges from an old witch of an orange woman, big football oranges, which when peeled were small enough, for they had been boiled to thicken the peel, so Aunt said.

On the steerage deck we were jostled by Jews with their bedding and food supplies. At ten o’clock, after we had stood in the vaccination line, the ship sailed from the dock, and I leaned over the side watching the fluttering handkerchiefs fade, as a snow flurry fades. Then the tugs left us alone on the great, bottle-green deep. There was a band in my heart playing, “I’m going to the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

When one makes a blend of bilge-water, new paint, the odor of raw onions, by confining them in an unventilated space under deck, and adds to that blend the cries of ill-cared-for babies, the swearing of vulgar women, and the complaining whine of sickly children, one knows what the steerage on the old “Alaska” was to me. The Jews owned the warm, windswept deck, where they sat all day on the tins which covered the steam-pipes, and munched their raw fish, black bread, and flavored the salt air with the doubtful odor of juicy onions. I heard the English forswear the bearded tribe, denounce them for unbelievers, sniff at the mention of the food they ate; but after all, the English had the wrong end of the stick; they had to stay below deck most of the time, and sicken themselves with the poor, unwholesome fare provided by the ship.

My aunt said to me, one day, “Al, I’d give the world for one of them raw onions that the Jews eat. They’re Spanish onions, too, that makes it all the more aggravating.”

“Why don’t you ask them for a piece of one?” I inquired innocently.

“What,” she sniffed, “ask a Jew? Never!” But when I begged one from a Jew boy, she ate it eagerly enough.

The height of romance for me, however, was in the person of Joe, a real stowaway. He was found on the second day out, and was given the task of peeling the steerage potatoes, a task that kept him busy enough throughout the day. My mouth went open to its full extent, when, after helping him with his potatoes, he would reward me by paring off thick slices of callouse from his palms. Joe said to me, “Never mind, lad, if I work hard they’ll sure land me in Boston when we arrive. I’m going to wark hard so they’ll like me. I do want to go to the States!”

In the women’s cabins, where I had my berth, they held evening concerts of a very decided pathetic kind. Like minor tunes, they always ended in a mournful wailing; for many of the women knew tragedies at first hand, and were in the midst of tragedy, so that their songs and humors were bound to be colored by despair. Carrie Bess, a stout woman whose white neck was crumpled in folds like a washboard, had wit enough to change the somberness of a morgue. She was usually the presiding officer in charge of the concerts. She was on her way to rejoin her husband, though she did not know where he was, but she said, “I’ll get on the train and have it stop in Texas where Jek (Jack) is.” And with this indefinite optimism she threw care to the winds and frolicked. She would throw herself astride a chair, wink at us all, open her mouth like a colored minstrel, and sing lustily,

“It’s very hard to see a girl
Sitting on a young man’s knee.
If I only had the man I love,
What a ’apy girl I’d be!”

Then, when the program had been gone through, with the oft-repeated favorites, like Carrie Bess’ “It’s Very Hard,” the concert would always close with an old sea song that somebody had introduced, a song which, as I lay in my berth and sleepily heard it sung under those miserable swinging lamps, amid the vitiated atmosphere of the cabin, and with the sea sounds, wind, splash of waves, and hissing steam, summed up all the miserable spirit of isolation on a great ocean:

“Jack was the best in the band,
Wrecked while in sight of the land,
If he ever comes back, my sailor boy, Jack,
I’ll give him a welcome home!”

When the numbered sails of pilots hove in sight, and the lightships, guarding hidden shoals with their beacon masts, were passed, the steerage began to get ready for its entrance in the land of dreams. The song went up, every throat joining in:

“Oh, we’re going to the land where they pave the streets with money, la, di, da, la, di, da!”

Finally we sighted a golden band in the distance, a true promise of what we expected America to be. It was Nantasket Beach. That made us put on our Sunday clothes, tie up our goods, and assemble at the rail to catch a further glimpse of the great paradise. An American woman gave me a cent, the first bit of American money my fingers ever touched.

Then the black sheds, the harbor craft, and the white handkerchiefs came into view. I strained an eager, flushing face in an effort to place Uncle Stanwood, but I could not find him.

Nearly all the passengers had left in company with friends, but my aunt and I had to stay on board in instant fear of having to return to England, for uncle was not there to meet us. I saw poor Joe, the stowaway, in chains, waiting to be examined by the authorities for his “crime.” I felt fully as miserable as he, when I whispered to him, “poor Joe!”

After many hours uncle did arrive, and we had permission to land in America. I confess that I looked eagerly for the gold-paved streets, but the Assay Office could not have extracted the merest pin-head from the muddy back street we rode through in a jolting team of some sort. I saw a black-faced man, and cried for fear. I had a view of a Chinaman, with a pigtail, and I drew back from him until uncle said, “You’ll see lots of them here, Al, so get used to it.” When I sat in the station, waiting for the train, I spent my first American money in America. I purchased a delectable, somewhat black, banana!

_Chapter IV. I pick up a handful of America, make an American cap, whip a Yankee, and march home whistling “Yankee Doodle”_

_Chapter IV. I pick up a handful of America, make an American cap, whip a Yankee, and march home whistling, “Yankee Doodle”_

The full revealing of the America of my dreams did not come until the following morning. Docks, back streets, stations, and the smoky, dusty interiors of cars, were all I had seen the previous night. When we had arrived in New Bedford, I heard the noise of a great city, but I had been so stupid with excitement and weariness that no heed had been paid to passing scenes. I had gone to bed in a semi-conscious state in the boarding-house where Uncle Stanwood made his home. But in the morning, after I realized that I was in America, that it was an American bed on which I slept, that the wall-paper was American, and that the window-blind, much crumpled and cracked, over the window, was the great drop-curtain which, drawn to its full height, would show me a stage, set with a glitter of things wondrous to the sight, I exclaimed aloud, “Chaddy, oh, Chaddy, I’m in America!”

Just as one hesitates with esthetic dreaming over a jewel hidden in a leaden casket, getting as much joy from anticipation as possible, so I speculated in that dingy room before I pulled up the curtain. What should I see? Trees with trunks of chrysolites, with all the jewels of Aladdin’s cave dripping from their boughs, streets paved with gold, people dressed like lords? All, all outside, with only that crumpled blind between me and them? Thus, with an inflamed anticipation and a magnified dream fancy, I hurried across the room, and let the window-blind snap out of my nervous clutch clear to the top. I pressed my eyes close to the glass, and there--Oh, the breaking-down of dreams, the disillusionment of the deluded! There was a glaring sun staring down on a duck-yard: a magnified duck-yard, bare of grass, of shrubs, criss-crossed with clotheslines, littered with ashes, refuse, and papers, with flapping mill clothes, and great duck-house; drab tenements, all alike, and back of them the bleak brick walls of a cotton-mill!

But never mind, I was in America! Chaddy was not. The scene I had looked upon was disheartening, somewhat like a sudden blow in the face, for those box-like, wooden duck-houses were not to be compared with the ivy-covered, romantic rows of Hadfield with their flower-gardens, arches, and slate roofs! But I was in America, anyway!

We had the breakfast-table to ourselves, uncle, aunt, and myself, for the boarders had gone to work long ago, and this was our holiday, our first American day! What are those round golden things with holes in? Doughnuts? They don’t grow on trees, do they? Baked? Isn’t it funny they call them “nuts?” I don’t taste any nut flavor to them. But I could not linger too long at the table with all America waiting to be explored.

“Don’t gulp down things like that,” warned aunt, “you’ll be sick, proper sick. Chew your food!”

“I want to go out and see America, aunt!”

“All right,” she assented. “Go on out, but mind the American lads, now!”

So I left the house, and the first act done when I reached the gate had in it, crystallized, the deep reverence an alien feels for America. I bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. I wanted to feel America.

Then I walked down the street of tenements, looking for an outlet from them, and hoping to get away from the shadow of the mill. At last the tenements were passed, and I saw some vacant building lots, with huge, gaudy sign boards staring from them. It was here that I heard a voice from across the road, shouting in broad derision, “Strike him!” A group of school boys were pointing at me. In the hasty survey I gave them, I noted that they all wore round caps. Mine had a shining visor on it. I hurried along behind one of those huge signs, took out my pocket knife, and slashed off the visor. Immediately I felt Americanized. I went forth with some show of a swagger, for I thought that now, wearing a round cap, everybody would take me for a full-fledged American!

But it was not so. Under a railway viaduct, where the shadows were thick and cool, I was met by a lad of my own age, but with twenty times more swagger and pertness showing on him. When he saw me, he frowned at first, then, grinning insultingly, he came to within two inches of me, planted himself belligerently, and mocked, “’Ello, Green’orn! Just come acrost, ’ast?” Whereat, knowing full well that he was heaping slander on my mother speech, I threw caution to the winds, hurled myself at him, and was soon engaged in tense battle. The fight did not last long, for, keeping up the English schoolboy tradition, I not only pounded with clenched fists, but freely used my feet--a combination that put to nought whatever pugilistic skill my antagonist possessed.

“No fair, usin’ feet,” he complained, as he nursed a bruised shin and hobbled off, “Green’orn!”

That word, “Greenhorn,” startled me. I cautiously felt of my head, for it flashed into my mind that it was very possible, in this magic land, that English people grew green horns immediately upon arrival; but I was consoled to find that none had sprouted overnight.

I continued my exploration, and found myself surrounded on every hand by mills, tenements, and shops. The streets were very dirty: the whole scene was as squalid as could be. Yet, the thought kept comforting me, I was in America. I returned home, covered with burdock burrs, arranged in the form of epaulets, stripes, and soldier buttons, whistling with gusto a shrill rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” So ended my first morning as an American.

_Chapter V. I cannot become a President, but I can go to the Dumping Grounds_

_Chapter V. I cannot become a President, but I can go to the Dumping Grounds_

Uncle and aunt went out that afternoon. “We’re going looking for a tenement,” said uncle. “We’ll be back by supper time, Al. Mind now, and not get into mischief.” They were gone until past the regular supper hour, and I waited for them in my room. When they did arrive, uncle seemed very much excited, and in greeting me he put five cents in my hand, and then extracted from his pocket a handful of crisp, baked pieces which he said were “salted crackers.” The only crackers with which I was acquainted were Chinese crackers, which we exploded on Guy Fawkes day in England.

“Will they shoot off?” I asked him.

“No, they’re to eat,” he answered. “There’s salt on them to make you eat more, too.”

“Where do you get them?” was my next question.

“At saloons,” he replied. “When you get a drink of beer, they have these near to make you drink more.” I looked up startled, and sniffed the breath of my aunt, who stood near, nodding her head rapidly, as if answering the questions of a Gatling gun.

“Why,” I gasped, “you’ve both been drinking! Both of you!” Aunt Millie made a stroke at my head, then lurched in doing it, and almost sprawled to the floor.

“What if we have, Impudence?” she snapped. “When did you sit in judgment o’er us, eh?”

Then my uncle, in an apologetic tone, broke in, “There, Al, lad, we only stopped in one place; sort of celebration, lad, after being separated so long. Don’t say anything about it, lad. I’ll give you five cents more.” But Aunt Millie flew into a terrible rage. “Don’t apologize, Stanwood. Give him a clout i’ the head, and let him be careful what he says. Drinkin’, eh? I show him,” and she suddenly swung her fist against my ear, and sent me stumbling to the floor. At that, Uncle Stanwood rushed at her, although he was lurching, and grasping her wrist, called, “There, Millie, that’s enough.” That brought on an altercation, in the midst of which the landlady came up, and said, “Stop that noise, or I’ll call the police. I’ll give you another day for to get out of this. I keep a respectable house, mind you, and I won’t, I simply won’t have drinking taking place here. The boarders won’t stand for it!”

“Oh, you insultin’ vixin, you!” screamed aunt, brandishing her arms in the air with savage fury, “Don’t you go to sittin’ on the seat of virtue like that! Didn’t I see the beer man call in your kitchen this morning? You hypocrite, you!”

“Oh,” screamed the landlady, leaving the room, “let me hear one more sound and in comes the police. I won’t stand it!”

“There,” cried Aunt Millie, consoled by the landlady’s departure, “I knew that would bring her. Now, Stanwood, let’s finish that little bottle before bedtime. This is our first day in America.” Uncle Stanwood pulled from his pocket a flask of whisky, and I left them sitting on the edge of the bed drinking from it.

The next morning Uncle Stanwood went to the mill where he was working, and told the overseer that he must have another day off in which to get a tenement and get settled. Then he and aunt found a tidy house just outside the blocks of duck-houses, and, after renting it, went to the shopping center, where they chose a complete housekeeping outfit and made the terms of payment,--“One Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week.” That plunged us into debt right off, and I later learned that even our steamship tickets had been purchased from an agency on somewhat the same terms. The landlady had told Aunt Millie that my uncle had been a steady drinker since his stay with her, shortly after his arrival in the United States.

“That accounts for his having so little money, then,” commented my aunt. “I fail to see where he’s making a much better man of himself than he was across the water.”

At last Aunt Millie had the satisfaction of “setting up American housekeeping,” as she termed it. But she did not find much romance in this new kind of housekeeping.

“See that homely thing,” she complained, indicating the stove, “Give me that old fireplace and the stone kitchen floor! I’ve a good mind to pack my tin box and take the next boat,” she half cried, throughout those first days of Americanization. “I don’t, for the life of me, see whatever brought me over here to this forsaken place!”

I had to share in the blunders that were made. I was heartily laughed at by the produce pedler when I asked him for “two pounds of potatoes.” The yeast-cake man looked at me blankly when I asked for “a penny’s worth of barm.” Aunt Millie did not see how she was ever going to make a family baking from a piece of yeast an inch square, when she had been wont to put in the same amount of flour a handful of brewer’s barm. On Sunday morning the baker’s cart came with hot pots of beans crested with burnt lumps of pork. We had to learn to eat beans and brown bread.

“I’m sure,” said my aunt when I brought home a five-cent loaf, “that they rise the dough with potatoes; its so light and like dried chips!” For the first time in my life I was surfeited with pastry. I bought several square inches of frosted cake from the baker for five cents, and ate it in place of the substantial food I had lived on in England. In place of making meals, when she wanted to visit with the neighbors, my aunt would give me five cents to spend on anything I liked.

The springtime was full on, and I found much pleasure in mixing with the tenement boys and girls, after school hours. While the schools were in session, however, I had a lonely time of it. But it was on those steps that I began to form a conception of what it means to be an American. It meant to me, then, the ability to speak slang, to be impertinent to adults, calling one’s father, “Old Man,” one’s mother, “My Old Woman,” and one’s friend, “that guy.” The whole conception rounded out, however, in the hope of some day becoming the President of The United States, and I was considerably chagrined, and my coming to America seemed a fruitless task, when I learned, from Minnie Helphin, a German girl, that “You got for to be borned into the United States, for to be like us ’Mericans, to be Preser-dent. My brudder, Hermann, him for to be Preser-dent, sometimes.”

I grew tired of being alone while the others went to school, so that one day, in spite of the warning that the “truant officer” might get hold of me, I went to one of the school yards, and, through the iron fence, watched all my friends at play, and immediately I said to myself, “You ought to go, too!” That night I said to my aunt, at the supper table, “I want to go to an American school.” She looked at me with a frown.

“School, is it? Who said so, the government?”

“No,” I answered, trembling in fear of her, “it wasn’t the government. I get lonely while they are at school. That’s why I want to go.”

She laughed, “Oh, we’ll soon find something for you to do more profitable than going to school. Go to school! What are you bothering me about school for? Education’s only for them that are learning to be gentlemen. You’re a poor lad, and must be thinking more about getting to work. Here we are, head and ears in debt! Up to our neck in it, right away! We owe for the furniture. That chair you’re sitting on isn’t ours. That stove isn’t paid for. Nothing’s ours, hardly the clothes on our backs. How we are to pay for it all, gets me. You’ve got to knuckle down with a will, young man, and help us out of the hole we’re in!”

“But the lad’s got to have schooling, Millie!” protested my uncle. She turned upon him with flashing eyes, and, half-crying with sudden anger, shouted at the top of her voice, “Listen to that! I’d like to know what _you_ have to strike in this for. It’s you and your drinking’s brought us to this pitch. There you can sit, while we are head and ears in debt, nothing to call our own, and propose that this Impudent go to school. He’s got to go out on the street with the McNulty lads and get wood and coal. That will be something towards helping out. Never mind about school till the government makes him go. That will be plenty of time for SCHOOL!”

“Picking wood and coal?” I asked, with interest in this new scheme to keep me busy.

“Yes,” she explained. “I was in McNulty’s this afternoon, and Mrs. McNulty was telling me that she’s entirely kept in coal and wood by her two lads, Pat and Tim. Seems to me that you might make yourself useful like that, too, instead of bothering your little brain about getting learning.”

“I don’t like to have him out on the street,” protested Uncle, somewhat feebly.

“It’s not a case of like or dislike, this time,” said Aunt Millie, “it’s a case of got to. You don’t bring in enough to pay up everything, so you _shut up_! You and your fifteen dollars won’t make creation, not a bit! Get off out of this. Go to the toy store, and get a cart or something for Al to get wood in, instead of sitting there telling me what is right and what is wrong. Go on; I’m going to send him out in the morning.”

Uncle took me with him to the toy store, where I helped select an express wagon, with tin rims, front wheels that turned this way and that, and the name, “Champion,” in red letters on its sides. Uncle rode me home in it, and seemed to enjoy the drag it gave him up hill. “There,” he whispered when we reached our door, “don’t tell your aunt that I rode you. She might not like it, Al, lad!”

The next morning Pat and Tim called at the house for me. They had been generously kept at home that day to show me their “pickings.” I felt a trifle puffed up over the gaudy appearance of my new wagon, for my companions’ was a crude, deep box with odd baby-carriage wheels, and it was named, by a black smudged tar sign, “The Shamrock.” But I did not long exult, for Tim, a little undersized fellow of fourteen, said, manfully, “Now, Priddy, if we shows yer things, yer got to divvy up, see!”

“What?” I asked.

“Got to square up,” he said, and with no more ado he placed himself in my new wagon. When we were out of sight of the house, Pat gave him the handle of “The Shamrock,” and placed himself in the depths of that dilapidated wagon, and I was told to “Drawr us. Yer th’ hoss. See?”

So Pat and Tim took me to the “pickings.” In our excursions we visited buildings that were in the process of reshingling, when we piled our wagons to abnormal heights with the dry, mossy old ones. We went on the trail of fires, where we poked among the fallen timbers for half-burnt sticks. There were skirmishes in the vicinity of coal-yards, at the rear of the sheds, where, through breaks and large, yawning cracks, pieces of coal sometimes dropped through. We scouted on the trail of coal wagons through cobbled, jolt streets, and managed to pick up what they lost. We adventured on dangerous spurs of railroad track, on marshy cinder dumps outside mill fences, and to the city dumping-grounds for loads of cinders, coal, and wood.

After a washing rainstorm, in the night, my aunt would say, “Now, Al, there’s been a good rain, and it must have washed the dust off the clinkers and cinders so that you might get a good bagful of cinders. You’d best go before someone else gets ahead of you.” True enough, I would find them in the ash heaps, as black as seeds in a watermelon, the half-burnt coals, which I loaded in my bushel bag and carried home in my wagon at five cents a load. If I returned with my bag empty, there was always some drastic form of punishment given me.

Life on the city dumping-grounds was generally a return to the survival of the fittest. There was exemplified poverty in its ugliest aspect. The Charles street dumps were miniature Alps of dusty rubbish rising out of the slimy ooze of a pestiferous and stagnant swamp, in which slinking, monstrous rats burrowed, where clammy bullfrogs gulped, over which poisonous flies hummed on summer days, and from which arose an overpowering, gassy nauseation. On a windy day, the air was filled by a whirling, odorous dust of ashes. It stirred every heap of rubbish into a pungent mass of rot. When the Irishmen brought the two-horse dump-carts, and swung their load on the heap, every dump-picker was sure to be smothered in a cloud of choking dust, as sticks, hoes, rakes, and fingers, in mad competition, sought whatever prize of rag, bottle, wood, or cinder came in sight. This was the neighborhood Gehenna, in which the Portuguese, Irish, and Polish dwellers thereabouts flung all that was filthy, spoiled, and odorous, whether empty cans, ancient fruit and vegetables, rats from traps, or the corpses of pet animals or birds.

Pat, Tim, and I, in our search for fuel, met quite a cosmopolitan life on those ash-hills. There they were, up to their knees in filth, digging in desperation and competition, with hungry looks and hoarse, selfish growls, like a wolf pack rooting in a carcass: the old Jew, with his hand-cart, the Frenchwoman, with her two-year old girl; the Portuguese girls and the Irish lads, the English and the American pickers, all in strife, clannish, jealous, pugilistic, and never free from the strain of tragedy. Pat and Tim could hold their own, as they were well-trained street fighters.

“Git on yer own side, Sheeny,” Tim used to scream to the venerable Israelite; “I’ll punch yer in the plexus!” and without a word, but with a cowed look of the eyes, the old man would retreat from the property he had been cunningly encroaching upon. Then Tim’s commanding voice could be heard, “Say, Geeser, hand over that copper-bottomed boiler to yer uncle, will yer, or I’ll smash yer phiz in!” But when “Wallop” Smitz brought his rowdy crowd to the dump, it was like an invasion of the “Huns.” We were driven from the dump in dismay, often with our clothes torn and our wagons battered.

And oh, what prizes of the dump! Cracked plates, cups and saucers, tinware, bric-à-brac, footwear, clothing, nursing-bottles and nipples, bottles with the dregs of flavoring extracts, cod-liver oil, perfumes, emulsions, tonics, poisons, antiseptics, cordials, decayed fruit, and faded flowers! These were seized in triumph, taken home in glee, and no doubt used in faith. There is little philosophy in poverty, and questions of sanitation and prudence come in the stage beyond it. “Only bring me coal and wood,” commanded my aunt, in regard to my visits to the dumps, but I managed to save rubbers, rags, and metal, as a side product, and get money for them from the old Jew junk-man.

_Chapter VI. The Luxurious Possibilities of the Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week System of Housekeeping_

_Chapter VI. The Luxurious Possibilities of the Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week System of Housekeeping_

During the remainder of the school year, from March to June, no public-school officer came to demand my attendance at school.

“Aren’t we lucky?” commented Aunt Millie. “It gives you such a chance to help out. The instalment men must be paid, and we need every cent. It’s _such_ a mercy that the long holiday’s on. It gives you a good chance.”

By this time I had added to my activities that of carrying my uncle’s dinner to the mill. My aunt always considered this a waste of time. “It takes Al away from his own work,” she would remonstrate with my uncle. “If he has to carry your dinner, I wish he would take it in his wagon so that he can bring back what coal and wood he finds on the street.” When that combination was in effect, she was mollified, for I managed to secure a load of fuel almost every day in my journey from the mill to the house.

This was the first cotton-mill I ever entered. Every part of it, inside, seemed to be as orderly as were the rows of bricks in its walls. It was a new mill. Its walls were red and white, as were the iron posts that reached down in triple rows through the length of it. There was the odor of paint everywhere. The machinery seemed set for display, it shone and worked so smoothly. The floor of the mule-room, where uncle worked, was white and smooth. The long alleys at the ends of the mules were like the decks of a ship. The whirling, lapping belts had the pungent odor of new leather about them, and reminded me of the smell of a new pair of shoes. The pulleys and shaftings gleamed under their high polish. Altogether it was a wonderful sight to my eyes, which, for some time, had only seen dismal tenements, dirty streets, and drifting ash heaps.

The mill was trebly attractive on chilly, rainy days, when it was so miserable a task outside to finger among soggy ash piles for coals and to go splashing barefooted through muddy streets. At such times it was always a relief to feel the warm, greasy boards of the mill underneath my feet, and to have my body warmed by the great heat. No matter how it rained outside with the rain-drops splashing lonesomely against the windows, it did not change the atmosphere of the mill one jot. The men shouted and swore as much as ever, the doffers rode like whirlwinds on their trucks, the mules creaked on the change, the belts hummed and flapped as regularly as ever.

It was very natural, then, that I should grow to like the mill and hate the coal picking. My uncle gave me little chores to do while he ate his dinner. He taught me how to start and stop a mule; how to clean and take out rollers; how to piece broken threads, and lift up small cops. When the doffers came to take the cops off the spindles, I learned to put new tubes on and to press them in place at the bottom of the spindles. I found it easy to use an oil can, to clean the cotton from the polished doors of the mules, to take out empty bobbins of cotton rope, and put in full ones to give a new supply for the thread which was spun.

I became so valuable a helper during the noon hour that my uncle persuaded my aunt to put in some dinner for me, also, so that I could eat it with him. He did this simply because he wanted me to have some reward for my work besides the fifteen cents a week he gave me. So I used to sit with him, and he would divide a meat-pie with me, let me drink some coffee from the top of the dinner pail, and share a piece of pudding. There was always a bright gleam in his eyes as he watched me eat, a gleam that said as plainly as words, “It’s good to see you have a good time, Al, lad!”

By the end of the summer I was so familiar with the mill that I wanted to spend my whole time in it. I had watched the mill-boys, some of them not much older than myself--and I was only eleven--and I wanted to swagger up and down the alleys like them. They were lightly clad in undershirt and overalls, so that in their bared feet they could run without slipping on the hot floor. _They_ were working for wages, too, and took home a pay envelope every Saturday. Just think of going home every Saturday, and throwing an envelope on the table with three dollars in it, and saying, nonchalantly, “Aunt, there’s my wages. Just fork over my thirty cents spending money. I’m going to see the matinee this afternoon at the theater. It’s ‘Michael Strogroff,’ and they say there’s a real fight in the second act and eight changes of scenery, for ten cents. They’ve got specialties between the acts, too!”

Other temporal considerations entered into this desire to go into the mill. I wanted to have a dinner pail of my own, with a whole meat-pie in it, or a half-pound of round steak with its gravy dripping over a middle of mashed potatoes with milk and butter in them! Then there were apple dumplings to consider, and freedom from coal picking and the dirty life on the dumps. All in all, I knew it would be an excellent exchange, if possible. I spoke to my uncle about it one noon-hour.

“Why can’t I work in the mill, too?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t you rather get some learning, Al?” he asked. “You know men can’t do much in the world without learning. It’s brains, not hands, that makes the world really go ahead. I wish you could get a lot of schooling and perhaps go to college. It’s what I always wanted and never got, and see where I am to-day. I’m a failure, Al, that’s what I am!”

“But aunt says that I’ve got to go in the mill as soon as I can, uncle.”

His face grew sad at that, and he said, “Yes, through our drinking and getting in debt! That’s what it’s all leading to! It’s a pity, a sad pity!” and he grew so gloomy that I spoke no more about the matter that day.

It was one of the paradoxes of my home, that being heavily in debt for our steamship tickets and household furnishings, and both giving a large amount of patronage to the saloons, my aunt and uncle involved themselves more inextricably in debt by buying clothes and ornaments on the “Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week” plan. There was no economy, no recession of tastes, no limit of desire to save us. Every penny that I secured was spent as soon as earned. I learned this from my foster parents. Uncle had his chalk-mark at the saloon, and aunt received regular thrice-a-week visits from the beer pedler. On gala days, when there was a cheap excursion down the bay, aunt could make a splendid appearance on the street in a princess dress, gold bracelets, a pair of earrings, and gloves (Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week plan). When Mrs. Terence O’Boyle, and Mrs. Hannigan, daughter to Mrs. O’Boyle, and Mrs. Redden, the loom fixer’s wife with her little baby, came to our house, after the breakfast had been cleared away, and the men were hard at work, Aunt Millie would exclaim, “Now, friends, the beer man’s just brought a dozen lagers and a bottle of port wine. Sit right up, and make a merry morning of it. You must be tired, Mrs. Hannigan. Won’t your babby take a little sup of port for warming his stomach?” Of course, Mrs. O’Boyle returned these parties, as did her daughter and Mrs. Redden.

My uncle dared not say too much about the visits of the beer-wagon, because he had his own score at the saloon, and his appetite for drink was transcendant. Aunt had little ways of her own for pacifying him in the matter. She would save a half dozen bottles till night, and then, when he came home, she would say, “Now, Stanwood, after tea, let’s be comfortable. I’ve six bottles in for you, and we’ll take our comfort grand!”

By Friday morning the financial fret began. My aunt, as financier of the house, had the disposal of her husband’s fifteen dollars in charge. In the disposal of this amount, she indulged in a weird, incomprehensible arithmetical calculation, certainly original if not unique. In place of numerals and dollar signs, she dotted a paper with pencil points, and did some mysterious but logical ruminating in her head. Her reasoning always followed this line, however:

“Fifteen dollars with a day out, that leaves--let me see--oh, say in round numbers, thirteen, maybe a few cents out. Well, now, let me see, out of that comes, first of all, forty cents for union money, if he pays it this week; two and a half for rent, only we owe fifty cents from last week, which we must pay this, or else we’ll be thrown out. Then there’s fifteen cents for that dude of an insurance man--he says he’ll lapse us if we let it run on like we have. Let him do it, the old cheat! I don’t believe they’d plan to pay us if any of us should die. They’re nothing but robbers, anyhow. Where was I, Al? Let me see, there’s owing a dollar for the furniture--WHEN will we have it paid for?--and there’s two dollars that should be paid the Jew, only we’ll have to satisfy him with fifty cents this week, because there’s a day out.” (The Jew was the man who kept the “New England Clothing and Furnishing Company,” from whom we had bought our clothes, a set of furs, and the gold bracelets on instalments.) “This week’s bill for groceries is five dollars and sixty-three cents, the baker has owing him about seventy-five, the meat man let me have them two ham bones and that shank end, and I owe him for that; there’s some white shirts and collars at the Chinaman’s, but I want to say right here that your uncle will have to pay for those out of his own spending money. That’s too much of a luxury, that is; we can’t go on with such gentlemanly notions in this house and ever get ahead. Oh, these debts, when will they be paid! That is all I think of except the beer man. He won’t wait, whatever comes or goes. There, that reckons up to--why, how in the name of God are we going to face the world this way? I’m getting clean worn out with this figuring every week!”

After finding that she would not have money enough to go around to satisfy all the clamorants, she would proceed with a process of elimination, putting off first the tradesman who received explanations with the most graciousness. The insurance man she did not care for, so he had to be put off, but, with his own interests in mind, he would carry us out of his own pocket until some grand week when aunt would feel kindly towards him, and she would generously make up all back payments. Aunt always went to the uttermost limit of credit possibility, arranging her numerous creditors like checkers on a board to be moved backwards and forwards week by week. The _beer man got his pay every week_. He did not allow _his_ bills to grow old. In arranging for that payment, aunt used to say, as if protesting to her own conscience, “Well, suppose some others _do_ have to wait! I want to have a case of lager in over Sunday. We’re not going to scrimp and slave without _some enjoyment_!”

Week after week this same exasperating allotment of uncle’s wage took place, with but minor variations. Time after time the insurance would drop behind and would be taken up again. Time after time the Jew would threaten to put the lawyers on us. Time after time the grocer would withhold credit until we paid our bill, yet the beer-wagon stopped regularly at our door, and Mrs. O’Boyle, her daughter, and Mrs. Redden would exchange courtesies and bottles. And Aunt was always consoling her sister women on such occasions with this philosophy: “The rich have carriages and fine horses and grand mansions for enjoyment; we poor folks, not having such, must get what comfort we can out of a stimulating sup!”

And Mrs. Redden would reply, “Yes, Mrs. Brindin, you’re right for sure. Just warm a bit of that ale with a bit of sugar stirred in, will you, please? It will warm the baby’s belly. I forgot to bring his milk bottle, like the absent-minded I am.”

_Chapter VII. I am given the Privilege of Choosing my own Birthday_

_Chapter VII. I am given the Privilege of Choosing my own Birthday_

The reopening of the public-schools in the fall found Aunt Millie stubbornly refusing to allow me to enter. “I shall never know anything,” I protested. But she replied, with confidence, “All knowledge and wisdom isn’t in schools. There’s as much common sense needed in getting a living. I’ll keep you out just as long as the truant officer keeps away. Mind, now, and not run blind into him when you’re on the street. If you do--why, you’ll know a thing or two, young man!”

Uncle pleaded with her in my behalf, but she answered him virulently, “Stop that, you boozer, you! We must get out of debt and never mind making a gentleman, which you seem set on. I’d be ashamed if I was you. Let him only earn a few dollars, and we’d be relieved. Goodness knows when you’re going to drop out, the way you’re guzzling things down. It wouldn’t surprise me to see you on your back any day, and I want to be ready.”

But some days later, my uncle came back home from work with much to say. “Look here, Millie, it might be good for us to send Al to school right away. If he must go in the mill, as it seems he must as soon as he can, then it’s to our advantage to get him in right away!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he can’t go into the mill, according to law, until thirty weeks after he’s thirteen, and can show his school-certificate.”

“But he’s only just turned eleven,” protested my aunt, “that would keep him in the school practically three years. _Three years!_”

“Normally, it would,” agreed Uncle Stanwood, “but it don’t _need_ to take that long, if we don’t care to have it so.”

“I’d like to know why!”

“Well, Millie,” explained uncle, “Al’s not been to school in America, yet. All we have to do is to put his age forward when he does go in--make him a year or two older than he actually is. They won’t ask for birth certificates or school papers from England. They will take our word for it. Then it won’t be long before we can have him working. Harry Henshaw tells me the trick’s common enough. Then when Al’s worked a while, and we get out of debt, he can go on with his schooling. It’s the only way to keep ahead, though I do hate to have him leave school, God knows!”

“None of that cant,” snapped aunt; “if it wasn’t for your drinking he wouldn’t have to go in the mill, and you know it.”

“Yes,” agreed uncle, sadly, “I know it!”

“Then,” said aunt, once more referring to the immediate subject of the conference, “it’s all decided that we get him in as soon as possible.”