Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own. In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him. Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with something in them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on--or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim--into his office. Jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men. The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail."