By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were smoking. "Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell your daddy?" "Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!" "You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?" "No, Pop!" "You're a queer little duck." There was a long silence. "You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God, I can't ... what is it you want to be?" "I don't know, only I want to go back to school again." "But what did you leave for?" "I hated arithmetic." "What do you want to study, then?" "Languages." "Would you like a special course in the high school? "Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine." "I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been teaching myself." "Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the _Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed." * * * * * Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job.... But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education went to learn. I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or with strangers that he fought. Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations. And our minds were trailed black with slime.