I have a dim recollection of several people who moved in and about this little house, but I have a distinct mental image of only two:  one, my mother; and the other, a tall man with a small, dark mustache.  I remember that his shoes or boots were always shiny, and that he wore a gold chain and a great gold watch with which he was always willing to let me play.  My admiration was almost equally divided between the watch and chain and the shoes.  He used to come to the house evenings, perhaps two or three times a week; and it became my appointed duty whenever he came to bring him a pair of slippers and to put the shiny shoes in a particular corner; he often gave me in return for this service a bright coin, which my mother taught me to promptly drop in a little tin bank.  I remember distinctly the last time this tall man came to the little house in Georgia; that evening before I went to bed he took me up in his arms and squeezed me very tightly; my mother stood behind his chair wiping tears from her eyes.  I remember how I sat upon his knee and watched him laboriously drill a hole through a ten-dollar gold piece, and then tie the coin around my neck with a string.  I have worn that gold piece around my neck the greater part of my life, and still possess it, but more than once I have wished that some other way had been found of attaching it to me besides putting a hole through it.

On the day after the coin was put around my neck my mother and I started on what seemed to me an endless journey.  I knelt on the seat and watched through the train window the corn and cotton fields pass swiftly by until I fell asleep.  When I fully awoke, we were being driven through the streets of a large city—­Savannah.  I sat up and blinked at the bright lights.  At Savannah we boarded a steamer which finally landed us in New York.  From New York we went to a town in Connecticut, which became the home of my boyhood.

My mother and I lived together in a little cottage which seemed to me to be fitted up almost luxuriously; there were horse-hair-covered chairs in the parlor, and a little square piano; there was a stairway with red carpet on it leading to a half second story; there were pictures on the walls, and a few books in a glass-doored case.  My mother dressed me very neatly, and I developed that pride which well-dressed boys generally have.  She was careful about my associates, and I myself was quite particular.  As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat.  My mother rarely went to anyone’s house, but she did sewing, and there were a great many ladies coming to our cottage.  If I was around they would generally call me, and ask me my name and age and tell my mother what a pretty boy I was.  Some of them would pat me on the head and kiss me.