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.

Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the
Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
Prisoner of Chillon_.

The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
hair in the Byronic style.

"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.

Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me
the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.

From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
beginning to devour my days.

I read and pondered, shaki