"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.