The conductor accepted my scalper’s ticket without comment, though he might have put me off the train on the least suspicion. I took off my heavy shoes, leaned back in the seat and fell asleep without a care to distract me while the express hummed smoothly through the night.
As soon as the train arrived in the New York station I had to hurry across the city to the steamboat wharves in time to board the Providence steamer for the dollar ride into the Fall River zone. Though I had never been in the metropolis before, and though I stood for a thrilling moment in the very midst of its wonders, impelling poverty drove me across the city like a slave-master’s whip, and I boarded the steamer with merely an impressionistic glance of some ferry-houses, some wholesale fruit houses, a dilapidated horse-car, some street corner blockades, a whiff of Hester street, and the East River bridges. After a night in the forward part of the boat, sleeping in a berth which might have been the confines of a barrel, while a drunken man next to me kept up a periodic, loose-mouthed protest to a man in the upper berth that he wished he wouldn’t snore so loud and keep everybody awake, I was put ashore in Providence. From there I was taken by trolley into Massachusetts and home. When I arrived in New Bedford I had thirty-five cents remaining in my pocket. But I was home! And ready for the next step in my education, whatever that should be.
Chapter XX Aunt Millie’s Interpretation
of Education. The
Right Sort of an Adviser Gets
Hold of me
I HURRIED—with a feeling of pride—in the direction of the tenement where my aunt and uncle were living. It was nearly noon. I would surprise my aunt! I knocked on the door. My Aunt Millie stood before me.
“Hello!” I cried. “How are you?”
She gazed on me with evident surprise, and with a mixture of suspicion, which she put in her first words:
“I thought you were out getting made into a gentleman—at one of those schools?”
“Why, aunt, I’ve had two years of education—so far. I mean to have more.”
“But where’s that fortune you’ve made?”
I gasped.