But his printery was his chief passion.  It absorbed him by its masterful stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking, flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths, and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental.  Even that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt his singular happiness of belonging.  Here he had spent the work hours of the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this was as native to him as the sea to a fish.  And glancing about the crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American—­clean of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success.  His father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man.  Then Joe’s mother had overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and they had settled down in the city.  Henry Blaine learned to write with his left hand and became a clerk.  It was the only work he could do.  Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the site of a modern apartment-house.  But Joe’s mother was glad even of a shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave “her two men” home together and go out and do such work as she could.  This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood, though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in washing.  Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and his mother fought it out together.  The boy entered the public school on Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace.  He was a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets and they went through English literature together.