As a result of being taken by a bar-tender to an Italian vaudeville show on the Bowery, the boy began to write—a farce, jokes, anecdotes “of the type for my class of people.” Then he bought a small Webster’s dictionary for a quarter and set out to master it. His companions laughed at him, but he persisted tirelessly. “I made them understand by spelling each word or writing it on a railroad tie or a piece of wood anywhere, just to express myself.” As his ardour and his reputation grew some young brakemen undertook to discipline him. “What they did was to bring new words every morning. They used to come half an hour before working time and ask me the meaning of the new words. If I could answer the first word all was well and good; then they were quiet all day. If not, when noon came all the office people, both men and women, crowded the place where everybody was present and tried to show me up. But their trials and efforts were all useless, as useless as I could make them. But one day they brought me before all the crowd, just to have me ridiculed perhaps, because they all were high-school lads. So they brought five words of which I knew only three. Then they began to proclaim themselves victorious. But I gave them two words they did not understand. Then I bet them I could give them ten words, and two more for good measure, that they could not understand. And I began: ‘troglodyte, sebaceous, wen, passerine, indeciduity, murine, bantling, ubiquity, clithrophobia, nadir’; and instead of two I added seven more to make their debacle more horrible. So I again wrote seven more words with the chalk which they provided me, writing them against the office façade where every one could see their eternal defeat: ‘anorexia, caballine, phlebotomy, coeval, arable, octoroon, risible.’ Then to complete I added ‘asininity’ and explained its meaning to them immediately.... After that triumph they named me ‘Solution’ and all became friends.”