God had not endowed me with any finer feelings than most of the lads I worked with, but outside the mill I put myself in closer touch with refining things than some of them: reading, occasional attendance on a Sunday-school and a mission, and in me there was always a never-to-be-downed ambition to get an education. That is why those conversations I was forced to hear were like mud streaks daubed with a calloused finger across a clear conscience. It was like hearkening to the licking of a pig in a sty after God in His purity has said sweet things. I felt every fine emotion toward womankind, and toward manhood, brutalized, impiously assaulted. I felt part of the guilt of it because I was linked in work with it all. That mule-room and its associations became repugnant. My spirit said, “I will not stand it.” My will said, “You’ll have to. What else can you do?” That became the question which held the center of the state in my rebellion against the mill. “What else could I do?” I wanted an education. I wanted to take my place among men who did more than run machines. I wanted to “make something of myself.” The arousement of this ambitious spirit in me was curiously linked with the reading of a great number of five-cent novels which had to do with the “Adventures” of Frank Merriwell. This young hero was a manly man, who lived an ideal moral life among a group of unprincipled, unpopular, and even villainous students at Yale College. Frank had that Midas touch by which every character he touched, no matter how sodden, immediately became changed to pure gold. Frank himself was an intense success in everything he did or undertook. He preached temperance, purity of speech, decency, fairness, and honor. He had both feet on the topmost principle in the moral code. True, with romantic prodigality he did everything under any given conditions with epic success. If he went to a track-meet as a spectator, and the pole vaulter suddenly had a twisted tendon, Frank could pull off his coat, take the pole and at the first try, smash all existing records. A Shakesperian actor would be suddenly taken ill, and Frank would leap from a box, look up the stage manager, dress, and take the rôle so successfully that everybody would be amazed at his art. It was the same with all branches of sport, or study, of social adventure--he did everything in championship form. But back of it all were good habits, fair speech, heroic chivalry, and Christian manliness, and the reading of it did me good, aroused my romantic interest in college, made me eager to live as clean a life as Frank amidst such profligacy as I had to meet. That reading spoiled me ever after for the mill, even if there had been nothing else to spoil me. I, too, a poor mill lad, with little chance for getting money, with so sober a background as was against my life, wanted to make my mark in the world as the great figures in history had done. I immediately made a special study of the literature of ambition.