This old man’s counsel made a deep impression on me. In terror of the things he described, and which he himself was, I made up my mind that I would not let my body get bent, crooked, or distorted, so I did as he said. I stretched myself to my full height many times a day. I exercised with weights and broom handles, even though I found it very painful. I gulped in the fresh air when out of the mill, and walked with my chest thrust out, a stiff, self-conscious, growing lad, fighting ever against the impending tragedy of a deformed body. _Chapter X. “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half” and His Optimistic Whistlers_ _Chapter X. “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half” and His Optimistic Whistlers_ By the middle of the following winter, I had entered fully into all the privileges that were mine by virtue of my labor in the mill. The background of all my privileges was the spending money my aunt gave me. She apportioned me money on a basis which kept me constantly at work. I was given ten cents on every dollar that I brought home. This made me ambitious for advance. It made me keep at work even when I should have been at home on a sick bed. It drove “loafing days” out of my mind entirely, for spending money was the _summum bonum_ of my existence. The kind of things I craved, the only things I found real pleasure in, cost money. I attended the ten-cent shows in the theater on Saturday afternoons. I looked forward throughout the week to a glass of hot beef-tea at the soda fountain. I would smack my lips long in anticipation of two-for-five cream puffs or a five-cent pork pie. They meant fully as much to me, then, as did the Horse Show or a Paris gown to the aspiring daughter of one of the mill stockholders. Intermittently, I used to go to the business section of the city alone, and stop at Cheap John’s, the tobacconist’s, for a treat of second-hand novels. There was a squat, gaudily decorated Punch standing in front of Cheap John’s, with a handful of chocolate cigars always extended to the passers-by. Punch’s jester’s cap, with the bells over his left ear, his hooked nose and upturned chin, always with a fixed grin on his shiny face, always seemed a human goblin, saying, “Come in, and have one on me!” The interior of Cheap John’s was like a country fair Midway. There were weight machines, moving pictures, slot instruments, lung testers, name-plate makers, guessing machines, card-wheels, pool-tables, racing bulletins, sport scores, displays of sporting apparatus, of tobacco specialties, of colored sporting posters, hat-cleaning wheels, clothes-cleaning tables, shoe-blacking alcoves, and a long counter on which were heaped rows on rows of highly colored, second-hand Wild West, Sport, Adventure, and Detective romances: a bundle of them for ten cents! A bundle of these I would purchase, listen to the men’s voices that came from the dense clouds of smoke, and then I would race home, a distance of a mile, to examine more closely the prizes of the night.