“Languages.”

“Would you like a special course in the high school?

“Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to work you in.  He is a brother Mason of mine.”

“I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already.  I have been teaching myself.”

“Well, you are a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the family, except your mother.  She used to read and read, and read.  And once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the Youth’s Companion once, but never printed.”

* * * * *

Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....

But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough prepared.  My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite wide, had also been too desultory.  The principal advised a winter in the night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education went to learn.

I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of an undertaker’s establishment.  This was because our leader was the undertaker’s boy-of-all-work.  Harry Mitchell was his name.  Harry, a sort of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day from New York, and had found work with the undertaker.  Harry had watery blue eyes and a round, moon face.  He was a whirlwind fighter but he never fought with us.  It was only with the leaders of other gangs or with strangers that he fought.

Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in the stable-boy and gutter way,—­by passing about among us books from a sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.  And our minds were trailed black with slime.

And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to them in falsetto voices.

* * * * *

As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant fatigue of a labourer.

It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners.  For the cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of terrible instincts.

* * * * *