a day. So
I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the "first
fight of the ironclads." Thereafter my life was to be bound up with the
iron industry. My job was in a nail factory. I picked the iron splinters
from among the good nails that had heads on them. This taught me that
many are marred in the making. Those that are born with bad heads must
not be used in building a house or the house will fall. In the head of
the nail is its power to hold fast. Men are like nails, some have the
hold-fast will in their heads. Others have not. They were marred in the
making. They must be thrown aside and not used in building the state, or
the state will fall.

I put the good nails into kegs, and the headless nails and splinters
were sent back to be melted into window weights. Handling sharp nails
is hard on the hands. And the big half-dollar that I earned was not
unmarred with blood. Every pay-day I took home my entire earnings and
gave them to mother. All my brothers did the same. Mother paid the
household expenses, bought our clothing and allotted us spending money
and money for Sunday-school.

This is a cynical age and I can imagine that I hear somebody snicker
when I confess the fondness I had for the Sunday-school. I don't want
any one to think I am laying claim to the record of having always been a
good little boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; I confess I did
my share of deviltry, that some of my deeds were foolish, and (to use
the slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. Once I bantered a
big fat boy to a fight. He chased me and I ran and crawled into a place
so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. I crawled under the floor
of a shed that was only about six inches above the ground. Fatty was at
least ten inches thick and I thought I was safe. But he didn't try to
crawl under the floor after me. He went inside the shed and found that
the boards of the floor sank beneath his weight like spring boards. And
there that human hippopotamus stood jumping up and down while he mashed
me into the mud like a mole under a pile-driver. I had showed that I had
"a head on me like a nail" when I crawled under that floor and let Fatty
step on me. There is a saying, "You can't keep a good man down." But
Fatty kept me down, and so I must admit he was a better man than I
was. Some people say you should cheer for the under-dog. But that isn't
always fair. The under-dog deserves our sympathy, the upper-d