How different the life of the city streets in the springtime! To Tom it was in a way fetid and foul. For months he had been living in a boarding house with some six, and often eight or ten, other young fellows, in narrow rooms above a foul street. The young fellows were unmarried and made good wages, and on the winter evenings and on Sundays they dressed in good clothes and went forth, to return later, half drunk, to sit for long hours boasting and talking loudly in the rooms. Because he was shy, often lonely and sometimes startled and frightened by what he saw and heard in the city, the others would have nothing to do with Tom. They felt a kind of contempt for him, looked upon him as a “rube” and in the late afternoon when his work was done he often went for long walks alone in grim streets of workingmen’s houses, breathing the smoke-laden air and listening to the roar and clatter of machinery in great factories. At other times and immediately after the evening meal he went off to his room and to bed, half sick with fear and with some strange nameless dread of the life about him. And so in the early summer of his seventeenth year Tom left the city and going back into his own Northern Ohio lake country found work with a man named John Bottsford who owned a threshing outfit and worked among the farmers of Erie County, Ohio. The slender boy, who had urged Bucephalus to his greatest victory and had driven him the fastest mile of his career, had become a tall strong fellow with heavy features, brown eyes, and big nerveless hands—but in spite of his apparent heaviness there was something tremendously alive in him. He now drove a team of plodding grey farm horses and it was his job to keep the threshing engine supplied with water and fuel and to haul the threshed grain out of the fields and into farmers’ barns. The thresherman Bottsford was a broad-shouldered, powerful old man of sixty and had, besides Tom, three grown sons in his employ. He had been a farmer, working on rented land, all his life and had saved some money, with which he had bought the threshing outfit, and all day the five men worked like driven slaves and at night slept in the hay in the farmers’ barns. It was rainy that season in the lake country and at the beginning of the time of threshing things did not go very well for Bottsford. The old thresherman was worried. The threshing venture had taken all of his money and he had a dread of going into debt and, as he was a deeply religious man, at night when he thought the others asleep, he crawled out of the hayloft and went down onto the barn floor to pray.