"I shall soon be earning forty or fifty dollars a week," I would muse. "At that rate I shall save up plenty of money in much less time than I expected.
I shall spend as little as possible and study as hard as possible."
The Regents' examinations were not exacting in those days. I could have prepared to qualify for admission to a school of medicine, law, or civil engineering in a very short time. But I aimed higher. I knew that many of the professional men on the East Side, and, indeed, everywhere else in the United States, were people of doubtful intellectual equipment, while I was ambitious to be a cultured man "in the European way." There was an odd confusion of ideas in my mind. On the one hand, I had a notion that to "become an American" was the only tangible form of becoming a man of culture (for did not I regard the most refined and learned European as a "greenhorn"?); on the other hand, the impression was deep in me that American education was a cheap machine-made product.
CHAPTER VI
COLLEGE! The sound was forever buzzing in my ear. The seven letters were forever floating before my eyes. They were a magic group, a magic whisper.
Matilda was to hear of me as a college man. What would she say? "What do you want City College for?" Jake would argue. "Why not take up medicine at once?"
"Once I am to be an educated man I want to be the genuine article," I would reply
Every bit of new knowledge I acquired aroused my enthusiasm. I was in a continuous turmoil of exultation
My plan of campaign was to keep working until I had saved up six hundred dollars, by which time I was to be eligible to admission to the junior class of the College of the City of New York, commonly known as City College, where tuition is free. The six hundred dollars was to last me two years—that is, till graduation, when I might take up medicine, engineering, or law. During the height of the cloak season I might find it possible to replenish my funds by an occasional few days at the sewing-machine, or else it ought not to be difficult to support myself by joining the army of private instructors who taught English to our workingmen at their homes
The image of the modest college building was constantly before me. More than once I went a considerable distance out of my way to pass the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where that edifice stood. I would pause and gaze at its red, ivy-clad walls, mysterious high windows, humble spires; I would stand watching the students on the campus and around the great doors, and go my way, with a heart full of reverence, envy, and hope, with a heart full of quiet ecstasy