_ 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