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.”