n that I could sit
down as long as there were no paying passengers in need of a seat. As I
sank into a corner outside seat I prayed that no passenger might require
my seat. But the car filled up, and, half-way in, a woman came on board,
and there was no seat for her. I started to get up, and to my
astonishment found that I could not. With the chill wind blowing on me,
my spent body had stiffened into the seat. It took me the rest of the
run in to unkink my complaining joints and muscles and get into a
standing position on the lower step. And when the car stopped at my
corner I nearly fell to the ground when I stepped off.

I hobbled two blocks to the house and limped into the kitchen. While my
mother started to cook, I plunged into bread and butter; but before my
appetite was appeased, or the steak fried, I was sound asleep. In vain
my mother strove to shake me awake enough to eat the meat. Failing in
this, with the assistance of my father she managed to get me to my room,
where I collapsed dead asleep on the bed. They undressed me and covered
me up. In the morning came the agony of being awakened. I was terribly
sore, and, worst of all, my wrists were swelling. But I made up for my
lost supper, eating an enormous breakfast, and when I hobbled to catch my
car I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day before.

Work! Let any youth just turned eighteen try to out-shovel two man-grown
coal-shovellers. Work! Long before midday I had eaten the last scrap of
my huge lunch. But I was resolved to show them what a husky young fellow
determined to rise could do. The worst of it was that my wrists were
swelling and going back on me. There are few who do not know the pain of
walking on a sprained ankle. Then imagine the pain of shovelling coal
and trundling a loaded wheelbarrow with two sprained wrists.

Work! More than once I sank down on the coal where no one could see me,
and cried with rage, and mortification, and exhaustion, and despair.
That second day was my hardest, and all that enabled me to survive it and
get in the last of the night coal at the end of thirteen hours was the
day fireman, who bound both my wrists with broad leather straps. So
tightly were they buckled that they were like slightly flexible plaster
casts. They took the stresses and pressures which hitherto had been
borne by my wrists, and they were so tight that there was no room for the
inflammation to rise in the sprains.

And