In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter xvi Off to College But to college I went that autumn, all the same. The examinations were no sooner over than I gave up my tutoring and my school and began to cast about for something real to do.I had entered the high school to attain a particular object. It had been defeated; but I had got something else in its stead. I had improved my English; I had acquired new and more regular methods of study; I had completed my entrance requirements, so that I need not worry now about working off “conditions ” in college. Still, there was no sense in keeping up the grind, even though the authorities sent postal card after postal card to Mrs. Schlesinger, threatening me with the visitations of the truant officer. They were snail-slow in that city institution. The course was, to all intents and purposes, finished; but they were taking the entire month from the end of May to the last of June to review and“wind up.”I could do better with those four weeks. Time was precious. If I got busy straight away, that very month might decide whether I should graduate in 1910 or 1911. In a financial sense I was no better off now than a year ago—rather worse, if anything. I had not only fallen behind by a year, so that if I entered college at all I would be a freshman when Goodman and a lot of others of my companions would be sophomores; I had missed the chance of laying up some money toward the lean years that were ahead of me.The failure to earn the State scholarship I had come to take philosophically . It merely prevented me from going to Cornell—the university I had set my heart on. But that prize would, after all, have paid only my tuition; my living expenses I must earn in any event. At one of the free out-of-town colleges,to be sure,it might prove harder to find work. But hadn’t I tried this past year to combine study with business in New York? And with what results? Besides, college was not high school. By all accounts a medical student had practically no time left when his day in the lecture-room and the laboratory was over. In a small town there would at least be no wastage in traveling back and forth. 126 The road to follow was, therefore, plain: I must utilize every bit of the three or four months between now and the opening of college. How? that was the question. Ornstein and Stein—my former employers —had a vacancy at the double-needle machine. But a week’s trial revealed the fact that shirts were going through one of their periodic slack seasons that summer. The union, too, had disintegrated, and piece prices were at their worst. Just when I was perfectly ready to work overtime there was hardly enough to do during the day.A little figuring showed me that at the present rate I would not get enough together by September to pay even for my trip to college. Fortunately my good cousin David was an electrician and was working as a lineman at the Pennsylvania Terminal, then building. I knew nothing about the trade beyond a few odd terms, such as “potential,” “cathoids,”“alternating current,” and “Leyden jar,” which I had picked up in my study of physics,and which David did not know and regarded as worse than useless. Nevertheless, he managed to get me taken on as his helper at a wage of one dollar and seventy-five cents a day. David was devoting his evenings to taking care of the tenement-house he was living in, and he insisted that I must come and take a room in his apartment . “You can save about twenty dollars,” he urged,“and it will be no loss to me. We have more space than we can use, and I am not paying any rent.” Once he got me up there he pointed out that there were no restaurants in the neighborhood (except American ones, which served food I could not eat), so that I must eat at his table.When the week was up and I asked Rose, his wife, to tell me how much I owed her, she sent me about my business, and added with a laugh that I could pay all in a bunch at the rate of ten...

Share