But, then, what could I do outside of the mill? I had done nothing else but work in the mill and spend a little time on a farm. If I left the mill at so late a time, left all the technical knowledge I had gathered while I had been going through it, should I be doing the best thing for my future? There seemed nothing in the future from the mill, for, as I have shown, I had not the strength to cope with more difficult tasks than those that then faced me. Probably if I got out of doors, in some open-air work, I should gain strength and be able to make progress in some other line of work. But I had been trying for that, and nothing had come. What then?
Then the greatest light of all came—flooded me. Leave the mill at any cost! Stop right where I was; quibble no more, offend all, risk all, but get away from the mill! It was all so simple after all! Why had I not worked it out before? Leave home! Have all I earned to save for my education! That was my emancipation proclamation, and I started to follow it.
First of all, I went to the overseer in that dingy room and told him frankly that the work he had given me to do was too hard for me. I could not keep it up. I also told him I did not care to leave just then, but, if he had any easier work in the room—doffing, for instance—I should like to continue. He did not receive this declaration with any expression of reproach, as I had expected, but said simply: “You go to work back-boying on those first three mules. You’ll make as much money by it as at anything in here.”
This first break made, how easily all others followed, as if they had been waiting around all the time! It was just at this time that I met a young fellow who had come back to the city to spend his vacation from study at a university in the Middle West. To him I told all my thoughts concerning getting away from the mill. I said: “I wonder if I went out where you go to college, and worked at something for a time, just to be away from mills, whether in time I might not have money enough on hand to be able to start on my way towards an education?”
“How much do you think you would have to save?” he asked, smilingly.
“Why—why, hundreds of dollars, isn’t it?”
“Do you think so, Al?”
“Why, certainly.”
“And how long would you work to save up?”
“Oh,” I replied, “that depends upon what I get to do and how much I could put by.”