Once I was sent to the machine shop for “strap oil.”  I was thrown over a greasy bench and was given it—­the laying on of a heavy strap not at all gently!  I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men seemed more attentive to their work than ever.  They smiled quietly to themselves.

In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the workers’ chief diversion.  And if you were strange there, you were sure to be hit as you passed through.

The acid house was a gruesome place.  Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America....  Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—­who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid.  The fumes rose in yellow clouds.  Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge.  But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, dispensed with this safeguard part of the time.  And whether they dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked, jaundice-coloured death’s-heads.  They went about, soon, with eyes that had grey gaunt hollows about them—­pits already cavernous like the eye-pits of a skull.

* * * * *

“Well, they don’t have to work in there unless they want to, do they?”

“Ah, they’re only a lot of foreigners anyhow.”

* * * * *

Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.

And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned, to do with as I wished.  Later on he made me save two dollars a week.

Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap, second hand ones, at Breasted’s book store.

Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.

My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume.  It was the only book he cared for, outside of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, together with, of course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret societies.

At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic learning that drew me to Byron.  I became enamoured of the Latin and Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in Hours of Idleness, and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the lamp light.  And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my own.