A Small Boy's Reading

I

I CAN just see the Boy at the other end of fifty years, looking quite small and far-off, as if through the wrong end of an opera glass, reading his first book. He was then about four years old. He is sitting in his own personal chair, which is so small that the grown-up chair in front of him serves admirably as a lectern. The book is small also; but the title seems rather out of scale. Here it is, with bibliographical exactness:

Line upon Line, or a Second Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving, with Verses Illustrative of the Subject. By the Author of Peep o’ Day. American Tract Society, New York.

No date, but a fading writing on the fly-leaf says that it was a gift to Mahlon from his sister Celia in 1846. And Celia and Mahlon were respectively brother and sister of the Boy’s mother. So the book was just a bit of flotsam and jetsam, cast up by the changing tides of family life, as were all the other books at that little house in Monmouth Road.

It has been pointed out that turning him loose in a well-selected library is no mean education for a healthyminded boy; but the humble collection of dull and hard books which was the sole foraging ground of this Boy was innocent of selection of any kind. Like Topsy it had ‘just growed.’ It included such gems as The Royal Path of Life, Gaskell’s Compendium, Slicer on Bap-tism, and The Conversion of Hester A nn Rogers. But they were not all as bad as that. A few were that mysterious something called Literature; their presence was even more fortuitous than the gorgeous products of the book agent.

The Boy read them all. His appetite was like that of the infant tent-caterpillar, which starts from the twig-end where it is born and devours every leaf it encounters in its journey to the trunk of the tree. And so we see the Boy, at the very beginning of what intends to be a lifetime course of reading, sitting in his little red chair, reading the book whose long title has just been recorded. Of course he does not remember the title with all the particularity with which it has been set down. Line upon Line was one of the books he salvaged when the little ill-selected library perished; and now, in a new dress by Stikeman, it has an honored place in his own library, which he flatters himself is less fortuitous and more eclectic than the one his infancy knew.

That is the first book he remembers reading to himself. It stands like a peak at the very beginning of Memory. Particularly a certain evening when he began the Story of Joseph. For the book was the narrative part of the Old Testament, emasculated, attenuated, and shorn of its splendid imagery to adapt it to the infant mind. And now, after fifty years, it seems rather patronizing in its tone and unduly insistent on a moral. The author of Line uponLine conceived of God as a sort of glorified Tony Sarg, whose puppets got tangled in their strings and caused him no end of trouble and vexation. She had apparently one great advantage over Moses in that she knew exactly how God felt about it.

But this is the intolerance of fiftyfour years. The Boy found it enthralling. It was not religious instruction to him. It was Romance, the Story, his first novel. There he sat in his little red chair, the book clutched in two tiny fists, the tears streaming down his cheeks at the incredible sufferings of young Joseph from the hands of his wicked elder brothers, hope springing at the unexpected soft-heartedness of Reuben, only to be dashed by the unswerving determination of Judah, until —

They threw him into the deep, dark pit; and there he lay hungry and thirsty and weary — without one drop of water to quench his thirst. How it must have grieved Joseph to think that he should not return to his dear father; and his father perhaps would think he was dead!

The wicked brothers cared not for his groans, but they sat down and began to eat their dinner.

God saw them from his throne in Heaven, and was much displeased.

At this moment of greatest suspense the Boy’s mother intervened. It was bedtime. No argument, no plea availed against the maternal decree, and the Boy wept afresh. The tears already flowing in sympathy with Joseph’s hard lot were now augmented in his own behalf. Go to bed, and leave Joseph in the pit all night! Please, please, just one more chapter. But Mother knew how exciting was the world of print to that book-hungry little mind. Already — the Boy seems to remember — grown-up heads were shaking and saying, ‘That boy reads too much.’

And so he went to bed, in such a state of suspense that the memory of it has lasted fifty years. The only hope for Joseph seemed to lie in that last line, where the author intimated, without authority of Holy Writ, that God was displeased and might be counted on to do something about it. Not an entirely dependable hope, for experience with previous chapters had not given the Boy undimmed confidence in God as a deus ex machina. The Boy did not know then and does n’t know yet whether the happy ending is essential to the divine Plot.

That was the Boy’s first serial story, the first ‘continued in our next ‘ — a method of creating suspense which Edward Everett Hale imagined that our magazine editors stole from Scheherezade. And frequently since, sitting up to finish a book in spite of an adult bedtime imposed by the demands of the next day’s work, the Boy has wished some high Olympian power would forestall decision the way Mother snapped off the story of Joseph.

The tragedy of that first ‘to be continued’ lingers in his memory; but the Boy does not remember reading the rest of the story, although he is sure he finished the book; for another recollection is that of standing up before his father and answering all the questions in the back of the book, —

What did most people in the world pray to?

Whom did God choose to be his servant and friend?

How many grandchildren and great grandchildren did God promise to give Abraham?

What was it Abraham did when he was on the top of the hill ?

Who buried Sarah?

Some of the questions now seem as baffling as that famous query, Who dragged whom how many times around the walls of what?

II

Some time before the thrilling events just recorded the Boy learned to read; but the details antedate recorded history and depend on tradition. He had a set of blocks. He remembers the blocks. They survived as building-material long after they had fulfilled their mission as steps to learning. They were oblong, about the proportions of a small brick, so that the two forms of a letter might be placed side by side — great A and little a, upper and lower case. Tradition says that before he could walk the Boy would select an easy morsel of learning, and creep with it to his mother, and call off its name, ‘O-o,’ giving a different inflection to the majuscule to distinguish it from its inferior neighbor, the minuscule. O was easy; the capital and small letter were exactly alike. H, Q, and G were hard.

Thus the Boy acquired letters, and soon he recognized them, not only on his blocks, which had become a sort of Rosetta stone for him, but on the printed page, especially the large type in the advertisements, and announced the fact to all within call with the insistence of an infant Archimedes yelling, ‘Heureka!’

Could learning his letters be called the turning-point in any boy’s life, or is it just part of the common lot, like teething, or long pants, or marriage? At any rate, the mystery of the alphabet exercised a profound influence on this boy’s destiny. For it gave him his job, which was printing, and his hobby, which was reading.

Both recreation and occupation were influenced by the fact that the Boy became deaf at an early age, which threw him sharply on his own resources for entertainment, and suggested also a trade that required the minimum of hearing. The alphabet was at once his plaything and his work-thing. He used to place those oblong blocks end to end, in a vain attempt to spell the words he knew; but the results were far from satisfying. Dd-Oo-Gg was no way to spell ‘dog,’ though it might conceivably be an economical way to spell two dogs. He cut out the large letters from the advertisements in the local weekly paper and pasted them together to form words, and he copied them with both pencil and paint-brush, like an infant disciple of Geoffroy Tory or Albrecht Dürer. And later, but not very much later, came the blissful day when, with a composing-stick in his hand, his fingers first felt the touch of the metal types, ‘the twenty-six lead soldiers which conquer the world.’

About this time there was another book, an earlier book than Line upon Line. He does not remember reading it, but he does remember the book, so he must have read it, over and over, doubtless, before and after the Line upon Line time. It was the Child’s History of England, not Dickens’s classic, but a more elementary work, probably the earliest historical information the infant mind is capable of receiving. It was a big, thin blue book, — what he has since learned to call a quarto, — and there were four gorgeous colored pictures on the lefthand page, and four squares of type on the page opposite, corresponding to the pictures. The type was that lovely big type in which children’s books are printed — and which old age covets — and which was known at the time the Boy became a printer as Great Primer. The Boy lived to see the old picturesque names of type sizes, which have come down from the days of Caxton and Pynson, give way to the more efficient point system, but he always wondered if the first book he studied was called a primer because of its type, or if the type was named for some early primary schoolbook.

This book then, with its chromolithographed pictures and its Great Primer text, stood for profane history just as the condescending syllabus of the Bible stood for sacred history. The first picture showed that ancient Britons were no more civilized than the heathen whom returned missionaries talked so long about after Sunday School, while the dinners of the entire Baptist persuasion grew cold. The text said that they dyed their bodies with woad (the Britons, not the missionaries), and the Boy did n’t know what ‘woad ‘ was, — and does n’t yet, — but he liked the funny word and remembered it. Then there was Boadicea with scythes on her chariot wheels, and Rufus lying face down with Wat Tyler’s arrow slicking in him, and, best of all, the scene in Canterbury market where the bishop examines the beautiful English girls with their long blonde hair, and gets off his famous pun, ‘Are they Angles or angels?’ Later information from other sources says that the bishop was Gregory, and the market-place in Rome, and the girls probably boys, but the former is the way the Boy remembers it. The last picture showed an ermine-clad Palmerston kneeling before a very fat Victoria, while the text piously ejaculates ‘Who, thank God, still reigns.’

That book, pored over at an age when everything made a deep impression. has become for that Boy English History. Nothing seen or learned since can efface those colored pictures and that Great Primer text. Memory supplies them as illustrations or commentaries on all history read since. Hume, Clarendon, Green, Macaulay have been able to add nothing so lasting. How he wishes he had kept that book, to compare it with memory, to straighten out some twisted impressions that still persist. Some Kansas cousins were suffering a plague of grasshoppers, which had eaten everything, memory recalls someone saying, and the Boy was persuaded to add to the bundle of clothing and other necessaries being sent for their relief, some of his own books, which he did, but not without wonder at the voracity and literary taste of grasshoppers.

To this same far-off forgotten time before the Age of School belong two books now faded to a mere recollection of vague horror. Though he has searched for them both for many years, the Boy has never set eye on either since, to learn if the reality was as preposterous as his memory insists. One was A Double Story, by George MacDonald, a fairly well-known author, but this fantastic tale is found in no set of his works. Perhaps it was never made into a book. The Boy read it in Wide Awake, and was wide awake many a night for thinking of it. Those who have read The Portent, or Phantastes, can imagine the flavor.

The other memory is more vague, and accordingly more preposterous. For in this book an American boy was blown in a small boat across the polar sea, and came to the land of perpetual night, where the people were all tall and thin and the color of potato sprouts from lack of sun. The king was very fond of stories; but when the teller told an untruth, the king said, ‘Whiz,’ and the court executioner took off his head. The king often said, ‘Whiz’ while the hero was describing his native land, and the Boy trembled with apprehension; but the princess wound her long transparent arms around the young adventurer’s neck, and the headsman did n’t know where to strike. These are only the Boy’s impressions, — remember, it is more than fifty years, — and it seems incredible that a tale so farcical as this seems to memory could have paralyzed him with terror as he remembers that it did.

At six years the boy put away childish things, such as books printed in comfortable Great Primer, and climbing upon a chair, he helped himself to literature.

III

Literature dwelt in a piece of furniture that stood against the wall of the sitting-room, known as The Bookcase, although it was a writing-desk and chest of drawers as well. The scientific name, I believe, is secretary. It was not an antique, though it may well have become one by now.

Here then, on three shelves, stood the ill-selected little library, the Boy’s visible supply of reading for the first ten years of his existence; mostly ‘The Complete Works of,’ in one volume; and that means two columns of small type to the page, with usually a ‘Life’ in even smaller type, and a steel portrait as a frontispiece. Their uninviting format enhanced their natural dullness, and, if there is anything in Freud, was perhaps the reason why the Boy developed later a passion for beautifully printed books — the result of what might be called a typographical inhibition.

The corner stone of this structure was Johnson’s Cyclopaedia, a puzzling word that surely somehow must have some connection with the three-wheeled vehicle the Boy rode, which he called his velocipede. Johnson was a formula, a rhythmic chant, that went something like this, ‘ A-to-Cam, Cam-to-Eli, Eli-to-Gon, Gon-to-Lab,’ and so on, rendered in chorus by the full strength of the company, like ‘Onery, Twoery, Ickery Ann.’ The company sat when thus engaged on the lowest step of the stairs which fled steeply up from the sitting-room, leaving one step extending into the room, as if the door had been shut too quickly for it to get out. It just held five assorted ages.

When, later, Johnson was found to be a treasure-house of raw material for school ‘Essays,’ he was always spoken of as ‘Old Gon-to-Lab.’

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the cyclopaedia were some old bound volumes of magazines: Ballou’s, Peterson s, Godey’s Lady’s Book (is one lady enough?), Harper’s, and the Atlantic. Ballou’s and Peterson’s contained fearful stuff that the Boy was forbidden to read, — such as ‘The Ghost of Perley Hall,’—but did read notwithstanding and was scared stiff. In the Atlantic he read for the first time ‘The Man without a Country,’ and in that magazine (or was it Harper’s), a little-known tale by the same author: ‘The Yellow Dog,’ in which it was imagined that Joseph (that Joseph complex again) tried to escape from the merchants to whom his brothers sold him, but was discovered through the barking of a yellow dog, and thus the world was saved from starvation.

In the back of one of the numbers of Harper’s, in the Editor’s Drawer, was a review of a little-known work of George Borrow. It seemed that there was a collection of Oriental tales known as The Hodja, or Borrow pretended there was, and translated it under the title of The Turkish Jester. The book was printed at Ipsw ich, in a thin papercovered volume, and has since become what is known as a collector’s item. The reviewer had been liberal in quotation — all that were fit to print, probably — and the anecdotes became part of the Boy’s stock in trade. When in the course of time he developed into a writer of advertising, he drew upon his memory and utilized many of those droll stories as points to hang advertising morals on.

There was one delightful adventure, in which the Hodja accepts an inviation to dine with a great personage, and hurries off in his everyday tunic. He is received with little respect by the servants, and given a poor seat far down the table. He rushes home, puts on his gorgeous Sunday tunic, and returns, to be welcomed with great ceremony and seated at the host’s right hand. Whereupon he begins to ladle the food into the sleeves of his tunic.

‘Why do you do that?’ asks the astonished host.

‘Because it is my tunic, and not I, which is the welcome guest.’

Whiston’s Josephus occasioned wonder as to what a josephus was. Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men suggested pictures, but there were none. Nevertheless the book proved a find, and much of it, especially the short, pithy ‘laconic’ anecdotes of the Lacedemonians became excellent straw for later advertising bricks. Lycurgus certainly had the slogan habit.

Farrar’s Life of Christ was a most readable book in nice large type, with a raft of interesting footnotes, which described such delectable things as the Greek acrostic whose initials spelled the word ‘fish,’ the sacred symbol of the early Christians, which indicated their secret meeting-places. The Boy had a scrapbook mind, and collected such fragments and used them when the time came.

Fables of Infidelity, in spite of its title, was disappointing stuff, all about the Reverend Mr. M— of S—, who narrated incidents about Mrs. C— and Henry R—. This device for disguising people never found favor with the Boy. Harper’s Drawer also had the habit. But the very name of this book was misleading. He knew what fables were. Had n’t he Æsop’s, with Tenniel’s pictures? Æsop was also a prolific source-book for advertising matter. The Boy in the course of time based at least a hundred pieces of copy on those ingenious tales, all of which he knew by heart.

A large fat book, bound in red cloth with gilt flourishes printed all over it, was The Works of Miss Mitford, which contained not only ‘Our Village,’ but seven other books. It must have proved barren to ten years of age, for no memory comes except that of its familiar floreated physiognomy.

Biblical Reason Why, on the contrary, is a vivid recollection. It belonged evidently to the Line upon Line school, and consisted entirely of questions and answers in the Socratic manner. Some of the questions were posers, but the book knew neither doubt nor hesitation.

Why does the Bible commence with the words ‘In the beginning’?

Why is the formation of Eve out of the rib of Adam to be taken literally?

Why was Jonah swallowed by a great fish?

The charm of this book lay in its quaint woodcuts — the baker and butler of Pharaoh, the Ark of the Covenant, Aaron in his High Priest suit, all the apostles with their insignia, and so on. This remarkable work has disappeared from the world, which is a great pity, as it knew the answers to questions that have puzzled archbishops.

Side by side on this shelf stood four fat poets, uniformly dressed in law calf with black and red labels, looking like the set of Illinois statutes in Father’s office — Burns, Byron, Moore, and Shakespeare, ‘The Complete Works of.’

As if it were not enough that these four poets should be linked together, there was a game of authors in which the same four formed a ‘book.’ Now nothing can sever them in that Boy’s memory.

No edition, not even the First Folio, seems so indubitably Shakespeare as that paunchy calf-clad book with the steel engraving of Miranda for frontispiece. He read The Tempest first of all the plays, of course, because The Tempest came first. Some Puritan inheritance led him to feel that a book should be begun at the beginning and read through.

It is more than likely that Byron registered more strongly than any of the quartette in those early years, because of the notes. There was a dado of them on every page, in blinding type, nearly all biographical. The unforgettable name of John Cam Hobhouse was spread all over them. The Boy liked names and he liked biography, and by a perverse association of ideas he insisted on giving the limp that should have been Byron’s to his friend, because of the name.

The inspiration of all the four poets was at first biographical. The Boy was interested in how they did it rather than in what they did, in the things that made them poets rather than in their poetry. He was and probably is more of a craftsman than an artist. He did read ultimately all the ‘works’ as well as the ‘lives,’ as he read everything in print that came his way; but a definite taste for biography was instilled by the meagre pages that prefaced each book, fed and nourished by the fat notes in the Byron, with their copious extracts from letters. Poetry came to him a little later, but the love for poetry is rather extrinsic — as an art rather than a message. Words and rhythm charmed him. He fell easily under the spell of Tennyson — another purchase of his own, and another instance of a book read from the beginning so that ‘Airy fairy Lilian’ and ‘Where Claribel low lieth’ obtrude in the memory because they came first in the book.

IV

When the Boy was born there were no comets seen, but a best seller shone upon his birth, namely St. Elmo, that immortal work of Augusta J. Evans; and from it he had one of his names, bestowed at the request of sentimental Aunt Celia, the same Aunt Celia who twenty years before gave Uncle Mahlon the copy of Line upon Line which became the Boy’s stepping-stone to books. The name is not uncommon among those whose birth year is in the neighborhood of 1868, and strange to say nearly all became advertising men. E. St. Elmo Lewis says he can account for fourteen. St. Elmo stood on the top shelf, along with Norine’s Revenge by May Agnes Fleming, The English Orphans by Mary J. Holmes, A Day of Fate by E. P. Roe, Brave Old Salt by Oliver Optic, and The Lamplighter by Maria S. Cummins, which, with Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs, represented fiction. St. Elmo had this effect, that its erudite and recondite allusions stimulated the Boy’s curiosity, and for several years afterward he made a game of the research necessary to find out what the author was talking about. He admired it prodigiously, and resolved to write like that; and did in fact produce a high-school oration that sent his teacher into hysterics. Does anybody know this book to-day? How would these remarks sound beside, say, a quotation from Babbitt?

‘Mr. Murray, if you insist upon your bitter Ösher simile, why shut your eyes to the palpable analogy suggested? Naturalists assert that the Solanum, or apple of Sodom, contains in its normal state neither dust nor ashes, unless it is punctured by an insect, the Tenthredo, which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without any loss of color. Human life is as fair and tempting as the fruit of “Ain Jidy,” till stung or poisoned by the Tenthredo of sin.

This by a girl of seventeen; but they all talked like that and were greatly admired by a boy of nine, who earnestly hoped that along with the name he would acquire both the erudition and the bitter cynical nature of the hero.

On the top shelf was a row of shabby volumes bound in black cloth that time had frayed to a dusty gray, among which were Hudibras, and The Complaint, or Night Thoughts, of the Reverend Edward Young, D. D. Hudibras had an exciting frontispiece showing a buxom and determined lady seated on a man lying on the ground, while the legend beneath in script type added to the excitement with something like this:

Perhaps that was n’t the way it went, but that is what the Boy remembers. He found it harder to understand even than St. Elmo, and there seemed to be no way to find out what it was all about. He did not care for it much and was confirmed later by Pepys, who lived in those times but could not, as he confessed, see where the wit came in. But, strange to say, the melancholy music of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts appealed to him so strongly that he began to commit it to memory, and made considerable progress, and can repeat much of it still.

In these middle years came the first bitter awakening to what is known as worldly wisdom. There was a serial story running in the fourth volume of St. Nicholas, by J. T. Trowbridge, entilled ‘His Own Master,’ and the Boy and his father were both reading it. The story told how Jacob, having sold the few belongings left after the death of his mother, set out for the big city, in this instance Cincinnati, with his whole fortune, eighty-five dollars and forty-nine cents, in his pocket. On the Ohio River steamboat he became acquainted with Professor Alphonse Pinkey, who, when he learned that the boy had this money with him, explained how risky it was to carry so much without a safety wallet. He, Alphonse, fortunately had such a wallet, and kindly offered to carry Jacob’s money for him, which offer Jacob gratefully accepted. The installment ended on this incident, — life was just one serial after another, — and the Boy still remembers with what unbelieving amazement he heard his father’s comment, ‘That’s the last he will ever see of his money.’

But, sure enough, in the next number the obliging Professor disappeared, leaving the Boy in something the same state of mind as Jacob, but with a tremendously increased respect for his father’s penetration and shrewdness.

But of all the books of that time the one that stands out most clearly in memory after forty-five years is Milton. It was a small, chunky, bright-red book, but it was complete — The Works of Milton, with the inevitable ‘life’ and portrait. The mental picture of it is a physical one, like the Shakespeare. That little red volume is Milton personified. Each page was surrounded by an oval wreath in which the blank verse made a neat panel.

As with every book, the Boy studied it from all angles, and wondered why, for instance, each book of Paradise Lost began with an argument. To him the word meant only one thing. And the titles of the poems on several occasions, ‘At a Solemn Music,’ ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,’ ‘On the University Carrier,’ ‘To Mr. H. Lawes on his Airs’ — were n’t those funny things for a great poet to write about? He did appreciate, however, the sharp, quick change in the metre of the ‘Ode to the Nativity.’ It made his heart beat faster. He puzzled a long time over Samson Agonistes. Was that the Samson he knew, the Samson of the Line upon Line? And was Agonistes his last name? It sometimes seemed as if one must have read everything before he could read anything.

As with Young’s Night Thoughts, the stately music of Milton’s lines appealed, and the Boy set himself to commit it to memory. He had not then learned of the young Macaulay’s precocious feat, and he never got by heart more than the first book; but the good he got from it was beyond calculation. Milton was undoubtedly the book that influenced him most. From it he acquired vocabulary and images, a feeling for words, for their deeper meanings, their power of suggestion, which was invaluable to him later in earning his living. Unlike the man who never ate strawberries for fear it would vitiate his taste for prunes, he has never been able to get Milton out of his system sufficiently to appreciate, say, The Waste Land. One day the teacher asked if anyone in the class had ever read Paradise Lost. Flushed with the pride of an adventurer in unknown reaches of literature, he raised his hand, and earned, and deserved, the scorn of every other boy in the class.

In the back of the little book were poems on various occasions, including, of course, Lycidas. The impress of this fine poem was deepened in the following way. The local W. C. T. U., of which Mary Allen West was an active promoter, offered a prize of five dollars to the schoolboy who should write the best essay on the physical effects of alcoholics. The Boy won it. No doubt that trenchant paper helped to mould the public opinion that brought about the prohibition landslide. But, anyway, with the money he bought a book (his first literary purchase), a book by John Ruskin, containing in one volume, Sesame and Lilies, A Crown of Wild Olives, The Queen of the Air, and Ethics of the Dust. Here was the first acquaintance with criticism. All of them affected him profoundly. And in particular he found in the lecture ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ a new way of reading poetry that sent him back to Lycidas, to commit to memory the ‘blind mouth’s’ passage, greatly excited at two such mighty minds, Milton, who put so much into a passage, and Ruskin, who got it all out. Don’t smile. He was serious. These things all came at the very beginning, and bent his mind the way it has grown. Out of that old Ruskin he got real help in his unconscious education which was shaping him for the w ork he was to do.

Two more links added themselves to what might be called the Milton era. In the school library was Addison, which he was allowed to borrow. What he remembers is the analysis of Paradise Lost, which he read from the unassailable position of familiarity w ith the work discussed; a necessary preliminary to the enjoyment of any literary criticism, he thinks.

Also, about this time deafness began to interfere more and more with life, and to say with emphasis to the Boy that books must be increasingly his chief resource. Among the poems in the back of the Milton was one that he appreciated as his own, learning it by heart and drawing from it a sort of comfort, all out of proportion to the merits of the case. The poem, of course, was the sonnet ‘On His Blindness.’

V

The peculiar process by which nature produces advertising men is similar to that by which she produces bootleggers, or brick-layers, or book-collectors. She gives us two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grands, and so on, until, when you get as far back as, say, Queen Elizabeth, one’s collective ancestors would make a community as large as the city of Cleveland — and just as mixed.

From the lower tip of this vast inverted pyramid one starts to live, helped or hindered by the least common multiple of the traits inherited from the city of Cleveland. Immediately education begins. For that Boy, whose early reading has just been sketchily outlined, the world-old conflict between heredity and environment was influenced by a new element whose effect could not be foreseen. His deafness introduced complications that required new adjustments, like deuces wild in a poker game. The immediate cause was measles at the age of six; but the predisposition was probably a part of his inheritance. He was at least ten years old before his condition was realized, even by himself. His fits of abstraction and oblivion were laid to inattention by the higher powers, both at home and abroad.

At the age of ten something was done about it. The resources of aural science were represented in that village by two specialists, not always sober, even when specializing. Their ministrations were barren of results. But while waiting in the reception room of one of these doctors, a patient talked to the Boy about a wonderful cigar-shaped boat that traveled under water, and thus he was introduced to Jules Verne. He had to read this new writer surreptitiously, for his mother had one test for all books. They must be true. She seemed to have had less difficulty than Pilate in recognizing truth. At any rate, time seems to have justified the Boy in his deceit, so much that Verne imagined has become true since.

Probably his mother’s unswerving allegiance to truth, rather than lack of means, was the reason that none of the great children’s books were known to him during that first ten-year period. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Munchausen, Tom Sawyer, Arabian Nights, Alice in Wonderland all belong to a later era, an era of conscious selection. No longer content with the resources of the little family library, he commenced to range further, with the aid of the public library. That library had one peculiar device. A white wooden screen separated the storehouses of literature from the reading public. This screen was punched with numerous holes in even rows. Each hole was numbered, and held a plug, one end red, the other blue. When a book was taken out, the librarian reversed the plug. Red was realization; blue defeat. But the Arabian Nights was not a library book. The copy the Boy read in the privacy of the hayloft was borrowed from the son of the colored barber — a fitting source, for were not barbers literary characters in the Arabian Nights?

Here then was the problem with which destiny had to deal: a boy who had acquired in the first ten years of his life a liking for books — not merely for reading, but for books, their writing, printing, and binding; who had somehow found within himself a strange affinity for print, for the alphabet, for words, their history and meanings; all this emphasized later on by contact with the types, presses, bookbinder’s tools. Growing deafness drove him more and more to substitute books for life, as sources of information, as resources of amusement, and all his inclination pulled that way. A typefounder’s specimen book or a catalogue of old books interested him for days. In that old series, the Harper Story Books, was one that described the art of printing as it was practised at the old building in Franklin Square. The Boy almost learned that book by heart. Fifteen years later he climbed the old spiral staircase in the courtyard one morning before seven, and as a journeyman printer, set up several ‘takes’ of one of Howells’s books.

At the age of twelve he acquired a press and a font of old battered nonpareil, and proceeded to publish the first of a long succession of periodicals, most of which never got beyond Vol. 1, No. 1. Soon after this he became the devil in the office of the Book and Job Steam Print, responsible first chiefly for the steam; but gradually he evolved into a full-fledged compositor with a setting rule, union card, and everything.

The relation between printing and advertising is a close one. A series of slight but critical incidents was shaping his course toward the latter, the most significant, in retrospect, being this: a national advertiser, seeking free publicity, offered a prize for the best advertisement of his product printed in a local newspaper. The Boy tried for it, and put his attempt in type also. He had a strong conviction even then as to the relation between the copy and the printed form that copy should take. The prize was fifty dollars, and the contestants numbered over fourteen hundred, so the national advertiser was well repaid. The Boy won the prize. Much water passed under the bridge after that; advertising had not yet begun to be a profession, but the prize advertisement completed the work of destiny begun when the Boy cut the letters of the alphabet from announcements in the town weekly, and pasted them together in new forms.