have blushed many times in my life,
but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one.

And sitting there on the stringer-piece in my shame, I did a great deal
of thinking and transvaluing of values. I had been born poor. Poor I
had lived. I had gone hungry on occasion. I had never had toys nor
playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched
by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years
old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store
across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt.
When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it
was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it
without any outer garment. For the first time I mutinied against my
mother--mutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store
undershirt so all the world could see.

Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors
and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child,
with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has
been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have
were those I got for myself. My meagre childhood developed meagreness.
The first things I had been able to get for myself had been cigarette
pictures, cigarette posters, and cigarette albums. I had not had the
spending of the money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these
treasures. I traded duplicates with the other boys, and circulating, as
I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities for trading and
acquiring.

It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every
cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian Beauties,
Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prize
Fighters, etc. And each series I had three different ways: in the card
from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album.

Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I traded
for other things that boys valued and which they usually bought with
money given them by their parents. Naturally, they did not have the keen
sense of values that I had, who was never given money to buy anything. I
traded for postage-stamps, for minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for
marbles (I had a more magnificent collection of agates than I have ever
seen any boy possess--and the nuc