In other words I am an active man of affairs, a man among men, a man of force and influence, who, as we say, “cuts ice” in the metropolis.  But the economic weakness in the situation lies in the fact that a boiled egg only costs the ordinary citizen ten cents and it costs me almost its weight in gold.

Compare this de-luxe existence of mine with that of my forebears.  We are assured by most biographers that the subject of their eulogies was born of poor but honest parents.  My own parents were honest, but my father was in comfortable circumstances and was able to give me the advantages incident to an education, first at the local high school and later at college.  I did not as a boy get up while it was still dark and break the ice in the horsetrough in order to perform my ablutions.  I was, to be sure, given to understand—­and always when a child religiously believed—­that this was my father’s unhappy fate.  It may have been so, but I have a lingering doubt on the subject that refuses to be dissipated.  I can hardly credit the idea that the son of the village clergyman was obliged to go through any such rigorous physical discipline as a child.

Even in 1820 there were such things as hired men and tradition declares that the one in my grandparents’ employ was known as Jonas, had but one good eye and was half-witted.  It modestly refrains from asserting that he had only one arm and one leg.  My grandmother did the cooking—­her children the housework; but Jonas was their only servant, if servant he can be called.  It is said that he could perform wonders with an ax and could whistle the very birds off the trees.

Some time ago I came upon a trunkful of letters written by my grandfather to my father in 1835, when the latter was in college.  They were closely written with a fine pen in a small, delicate hand, and the lines of ink, though faded, were like steel engraving.  They were stilted, godly—­in an ingenuous fashion—­at times ponderously humorous, full of a mild self-satisfaction, and inscribed under the obvious impression that only the writer could save my father’s soul from hell or his kidneys from destruction.  The goodness of the Almighty, as exemplified by His personal attention to my grandfather, the efficacy of oil distilled from the liver of the cod, and the wisdom of Solomon, came in for an equal share of attention.  How the good old gentleman must have enjoyed writing those letters!  And, though I have never written my own son three letters in my life, I suppose the desire of self-expression is stirring in me now these seventy-eight years later.  I wonder what he would have said could he read these confessions of mine—­he who married my grandmother on a capital of twenty-five dollars and enough bleached cotton to make half a dozen shirts!  My annual income would have bought the entire county in which he lived.  My son scraped through Harvard on twenty-five hundred dollars a year.  I have no doubt that he left undisclosed liabilities behind him.  Most of this allowance was spent on clothes, private commons and amusement.  Lying before me is my father’s term bill at college for the first half year of 1835.  The items are: