you. Youth in its search for something--and
age--were quickly to feel this. It was no fool's paradise.

Eugene, once he was settled, realized this. He had the notion, somehow,
that the printer's trade was all over for him. He wanted no more of
that. He wanted to be an artist or something like that, although he
hardly knew how to begin. The papers offered one way, but he was not
sure that they took on beginners. He had had no training whatever. His
sister Myrtle had once said that some of his little thumb-nail sketches
were pretty, but what did she know? If he could study somewhere, find
someone who would teach him.... Meanwhile he would have to work.

He tried the newspapers first of course, for those great institutions
seemed the ideal resort for anyone who wanted to get up in the world,
but the teeming offices with frowning art directors and critical
newspaper workers frightened him. One art director did see something in
the three or four little sketches he showed, but he happened to be in a
crusty mood, and did not want anybody anyway. He simply said no, there
was nothing. Eugene thought that perhaps as an artist also, he was
destined to be a failure.

The trouble with this boy was really that he was not half awake yet. The
beauty of life, its wonder, had cast a spell over him, but he could not
yet interpret it in line and color. He walked about these wonderful
streets, gazing in the windows, looking at the boats on the river,
looking at the ships on the lake. One day, while he was standing on the
lake shore, there came a ship in full sail in the offing--the first he
had ever seen. It gripped his sense of beauty. He clasped his hands
nervously and thrilled to it. Then he sat down on the lake wall and
looked and looked and looked until it gradually sank below the horizon.
So this was how the great lakes were; and how the great seas must
be--the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Ah, the sea! Some
day, perhaps he would go to New York. That was where the sea was. But
here it was also, in miniature, and it was wonderful.

One cannot moon by lake shores and before store windows and at bridge
draws and live, unless one is provided with the means of living, and
this Eugene was not. He had determined when he left home that he would
be independent. He wanted to get a salary in some way that he could at
least live on. He wanted to write back and be able to say that he was
getting along nicely. His trunk came, a