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When the engine model was complete and had many yards of track to run upon, I made it run all around our yard. When its tiny whistle blew, you should have seen my father's mustache widen with his grin of pride.

It must have been about the end of my second year that trouble came. At first I had been paid five cents an hour; for a ten-hour day I got just half of that dollar I had received when I was only a sweeper. But through my second year I got ten cents an hour, and at the time I speak of I was within a few weeks of being entitled to the third-year rate of pay, twelve and a half cents an hour. That was enough money then; I slept and ate at home, and my mother still made most of the clothes I wore. If I worked on the night shift, my mother packed an oblong dinner pail with food enough to fill me up. If I worked days, I went home to lunch—not lunch; that was dinner, then.

Midday, when the shop whistle blew and told Ellis women to get ready for their men, I rushed, with the other soot-and-grease-stained mechanics, to a trough where we washed up. When I had been a sweeper, to fill that long blackened trough with water about ten minutes before noon had been a chore of mine. When all of us had washed our faces, necks and hands in that trough, the water was a dirty fluid, gray and bubbly.