“But these years of his life are the most valuable he’ll ever have!” “The more reason why he ought to learn to make money in ’em!” “It’s a mystery why God sends children to such as you!” “Well, He sends ’em and I reckon He knows his business. He’s been running this planet a darned long time.” Threat, appeal, argument did no good. Nathan went into Caleb Gridley’s tannery, into the foul, revolting, messy, nauseating part of the business, and for six days of working from 6:30 in the morning until 6:30 at night he received four dollars, not in cash but in credit on the old harness bill. In sixteen weeks the debt was paid. Then Johnathan “began realizing good hard cash” on Nathan’s earning abilities. Nathan’s sister went on through the graded school and high school. It was Nathan’s money which bought her graduation dress. It was a very pretty dress. It cost twenty-nine dollars. II Never did a boy change so completely or age so quickly as Nathan in the three years which followed. He was sick and broken the first two or three weeks at the sights he was compelled to witness and the smells which adhered to him like a plague wherever he moved. I tried to get him to come out on Sundays. “I dunno, Bill,” he would answer, “I don’t seem to care much about fooling ’round. Seems as if I’m tired these days, tired all the while. I no more’n get home Saturday night than it’s Monday morning and I gotta go back to it all. Oh, Bill, it’ll kill me sure. You don’t know anything about it. It’s awful!” The boy lost weight. He grew more and more listless—bitter, moody. “I don’t care whether I live or die,” he wailed one day when I mentioned that after the Academy I was going on to college. “Sometimes I wish old ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ knife would slip when he’s skinnin’ and take me right acrost the throat.” The boy’s life suddenly became a hopeless, hideous slavery. The horror of his work lay in his imagination. A lad of coarser fiber would have become inured to the tannery. Nathan never became inured to it. Yet he stuck it through. There was no alternative. Sunday afternoons he would wander over the hills, lie on his back beside some peaceful meadow brook and dream his dreams. He began taking a pad and pencil on these solitary excursions, or a book. He cared little for Old Cap Collier or King Brady or the other penny-dreadfuls which were then in their heyday. His choice was poetry, fairy tales, Shakespeare. “What’s the use of reading that stuff?” he demanded contemptuously one day, after finishing a sample hair-curler I had shown him. “It’s all coarse and mechanical, and you know the villain’s going to die at the right minute, anyhow, and the hero win out and all live happily ever after. And if you know it in advance what’s the use of spending a whole day readin’ through it to find it out?” Then the boy pulled a volume of poems from beneath him, a book that Miss Cora Hastings had loaned him. He read me “Grey’s Elegy.”