Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/636

620 let me go to the wharf early in the morning to get the meat. As soon as I brought it home, I made haste to the bay, and spent many long hours to view the cosmopolitan sights. I made acquaintance with the rough-looking though good-natured sailors. They taught me many good and bad ways. I was quick to see and understand. I learned from them how to draw a picture of a ship. I made very good pictures, indeed, for a boy of my age. I sometimes doubt if I can draw a ship with her details so good now as I did that time, because I used to notice all the parts of the whole ship. (I am now an amateur artist and photographer. I teach drawing at school.)

I loved money. I liked best to have dimes and half-dimes. The love of money led me to steal some little money. I was an adept in theft. I could steal some small thing easily, most without being detected. Yet my friends or some other person knew from hearing my steps that I had taken something, usually eatables. But I never confessed it, even by threats, nay, by ready force. That habit was mainly owing to the condition of hunger; this was an excusable necessity, I say. I was often ill-fed at home. It meant punishment for staying away too long. This stung me dearly towards stubbornness, and I became worse and worse. It shows plainly that there is no greater fallacy than 'the child's will must be broken!' Will forms the production of character. Without strength of will there will be no strength of purpose.

I began to find a new kind of pleasure in being out at night, because I could see more vicissitudes of evil amid the din of dissipation peculiar to the early days of California, then before the sixties. I was as a moth midst the dazzling lights of the night revels. I became quite a nocturnal being. In this way I contracted many bad things during my abandoned youth, — a period of four years. The influence of this evil has still retained some fascinating but unhealthy influence over my imagination. On this account I sometimes ask myself, with a certain sense of mystery and gratitude, if I had left school twenty years ago, and gone somewhere for a living, what might have become of me? I have been connected with this school thirty-one years. My long, home-like stay prevents me from ever returning to that pernicious life too soon.

More about stealing. Often did I go out at night with an empty stomach. I had to find something to satiate my hunger. Sometimes I returned home at midnight without a morsel, and entered the kitchen quietly. I took bread or meat, or what else I could hold, and slipped away. Sometimes it was done at the different houses of my friends. They would be too glad to give me some food, but I was too proud or ashamed to beg. Sometimes I took a loaf of fresh bread off the door-steps where the baker put it. Sometimes, while passing close to the fruit-stand, I slipped one apple or two into my pockets or shirt. I had no intuitive conscience at all. There might possibly be a mote of it when I thought of the moon (you have already known my cosmology). Of course, hunger was stronger than conscience. Yet that faculty seemed to be more or less active. I shall say how I was cured of stealing. I frequented a meat-shop. The good-natured butcher let me go about at large. I happened to see some money in a box under the counter behind. I thought of getting some little money there. So I went back and crept slowly to the box and took a dime. I feasted on its worth of candy.