An evening school in a mill city is a splendid commentary on ambition. There one finds ambition at its best. After a day’s work of ten and a half hours, tired, tired, tired with the long day of heat and burden-bearing, lungs choking for inhalations of fresh, cool air, faces flushed with the dry heat of the room, ears still dulled by the roar and clank of machines, brains numbed by hours and hours of routine--yet there they are, men grown, some of them with moustaches, growing lads of fifteen, and sixteen, girls and women, all of many nationalities, spending a couple of the precious hours of their freedom scratching on papers, counting, musing over dry stuff, all because they want to atone for past intellectual neglect. I was there because I wanted to push past fractions and elementary history, and go on towards the higher things. I was entirely willing to forego priceless hours for two nights a week to get more of a knowledge of the rudiments from which I had been taken by the mill. I had a seat quite back in the room, because I had intimations that some of the gang were going to “cut up,” and that a back seat would put me out of the danger zone of shooting peas, clay bullets, and other inventions. The man directly in front of me, with a first reader in his hand, was a tall Portuguese, the father of a family of children. As soon as the starting gong had clanged through the halls, the gang began its operations. Dutchy, in spite of his avowed intention of seriously entering the school, pretended that he could not recite the alphabet. “Bunny,” a young Englishman, tried to pass himself off as a Swede and ignorant of English entirely. While the teachers were busy with the details of organization, the air was filled with riot, the special policeman was called in, and I along with the gang was threatened with arrest. Notwithstanding that such careful watch was maintained, the two weeks of night-school that I attended were filled with such disturbances that I grew discouraged and abandoned the project. Whenever a circus or a fête, like the semi-centennial of the city, was advertised, the gang always planned to attend, in spite of the fact that the mills would not shut down. Six of us, in one room, by keeping away at noon, could cripple the mule-room so seriously that it could not run, and the spinners would get an afternoon off. Sometimes a group of spinners would hint to us to stay out that they might have a chance. That was my first experience in a form of labor-unionism. Some of the men we worked under in the mill had a club-room, where they played table games, drank beer when the saloons were legally closed, and had Saturday night smokers, which my uncle attended, and where he was generally called upon to “vamp” on the piano.