The gang used to haunt this club, and, when there was a concert on, would climb up and look in the windows. Finally we decided that we ought to have a club-room of our own. We sought out and rented a shanty which had served as a tiny shop, we pasted pictures of actresses, prize fighters, and bicycle champions around the walls, had a small card table covered with magazines and newspapers, and initiated ourselves into the “club.” The evenings of the first week we occupied, mainly, in sitting in front of the club, tilted back in chairs, and shouting to other mill lads, as they passed, in reply to their cynical salutations of “Gee, what style!” or, “Aw, blow off!” with a swaggering, “Ah, there, Jimmy. Come in and have a game!” Each member of the club kept from work a day, the better to taste the joys of club life to the full. About the fourth week, after we had held forth in a tempestuous whirl of boxing bouts, card matches, smoking bouts, and sensational novel-reading, the landlord repented of his bargain, locked us out, and declared to our remonstrance committee that he could no longer rent us the shanty, because we had become a “set of meddlin’ ne’er-do-wells!” So we went back to the drug-store corner, with its drinking trough, where we could have been found huddled, miserable, like animals who have so much liberty and do not know how intelligently to use it. For we knew that after the night, came the morning, and with the morning another round in the mill, a fight with a machine, a ten hours’ dwelling in heated, spiceless, unexciting monotony, and a thought like that made us want to linger as long as we dared on that drug-store corner. _Chapter XV. The College Graduate Scrubber Refreshes my Ambitions_ _Chapter XV. The College Graduate Scrubber Refreshes my Ambitions_ At sixteen years of age, after three years in a mill-room, and with the unsocial atmosphere of my home to discourage me, I had grown to discount that old ambition of mine, to “make something of myself.” My body had been beaten into a terrifying weakness and lassitude by the rigors of the mill. My esthetic sense of things had been rudely, violently assaulted by profanity, immorality, and vile indecencies. I had come to that fatalistic belief, which animates so many in the mill, that the social bars are set up, and are set up forever. I should always have to be in the mill. I should never get out of it!