By this time he was a little more than 17 years old; an active, wiry young man, his muscles hard and his hands calloused from work. After nearly a year of complete absorption in mechanical problems, his natural liking for human companionship began to assert itself. At the drydock works he found a group of young men like himself, hard-working, fun-loving young mechanics. In a few weeks he was popular with them. They were a clean, energetic lot, clear-thinking and ambitious, as most mechanics are. After the day's work was finished they rushed through the wide doors into the street, with a whoop of delight in the outdoor air, jostling each other, playing practical jokes, enjoying a little rough horseplay among themselves. In the evenings they wandered about the streets in couples, arms carelessly thrown over each other's shoulders, commenting on things they saw. They learned every inch of the water front; tried each other out in wrestling and boxing. Eager young fellows, grasping at life with both hands, wanting all of it, and wanting it right then--naturally enough they smoked, drank, experimented with love-making, turned night into day in a joyous carouse now and then. But before long Henry Ford was a leader among them, as he had been among the boys in the Greenfield school, and again he diverted the energy of his followers into his own channels. Pursuits that had interested them seemed to him a waste of time and strength. He did not smoke--his tentative attempt with hay-cigarettes in his boyhood had discouraged that permanently--he did not drink, and girls seemed to him unutterably stupid. "I have never tasted liquor in my life," he says. "I'd as soon think of taking any other poison." Undoubtedly his opinion is right, but one is inclined to doubt the accuracy of his memory. In those early days in Detroit he must have experimented at least once with the effects of liquor on the human system; probably once would have been sufficient. Besides, about that time he developed an interest so strong that it not only absorbed his own attention, but carried that of his friends along with it. He bought a watch. It had taken him only a few months to master his task in the drydock works so thoroughly that his wages were raised. Later they were raised again. Then he was getting five dollars a week, more than enough to pay his expenses, without night work. He left the jeweler's shop, but he brought with him a watch, the first he had ever owned. Immediately he took it to pieces. When its scattered parts lay on a table before him he looked at them and marveled. He had paid three dollars for the watch, and he could not figure out any reason why it should have cost so much. "It ran," he says. "It had some kind of a dark composition case, and it weighed a good deal, and it went along all right--never lost or gained more than a certain amount in any given day.