The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
eye-pits of a skull.
* * * * *
"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.
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