I took the Success Magazine, read the first part of Beecher’s biography, where he made a tablecloth of an old coat, and fought through adverse circumstances. I fellowshipped with Lincoln as he sprawled on the hearth and made charcoal figures on the shovel. I felt that there must be something beyond the mill for me. But the question always came, “What else can you do?” And the question had great, tragic force, too. I had not strength enough to make a success in the mule-room. I had an impoverished supply of muscle. My companions could outlift me, outwork me, and the strenuous, unhealthy work was weakening me. The long hours without fresh air made me faint and dizzy. One of the back-boys, himself a sturdy fellow, in fun, poked my chest, and when I gave back with pain, he laughed, and sneered “Chicken-breasted!” That humiliated me, and I might have been found thereafter gasping in the vitiated air, enthused by the hope that I could increase my chest expansion a few inches; and I also took small weights and worked them up and down with the intention of thickening my muscles! “What else can you do?” That haunted me. It would not be long before I should have to give in: to tell my overseer that I had not strength enough to do the work. Yet, as if Fate had obsessed me with the idea, I could not bring myself to think that the world was open to exploration; that there were easier tasks. I was curiously under the power of the fatalistic, caste thought, that _once a mill-boy, always a mill-boy_. I could not conceive there was any other chance in another direction. That was part of the terror of the mill in those days. So that dream, “to make something of myself,” with a college appended, only made my days in the mill harder to bear. When the sun is warm, and you, yourself are shut in a chilly room, the feeling is intensified tragedy.