She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.  She procured a divorce as quietly as possible.  Then my grandfather made his final disappearance.  I did not see him again till I was quite grown up.

All support of his numerous family ceased.  His sons and daughters had to go to work while still children, or marry.

My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as “Uncle Beck.”  My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather’s business-sense, with none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a substantial citizen.

My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom, driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.

* * * * *

The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was looking rather seedy by this time.  The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of strange people we then called the “low Irish” came to work in them, and our Mansion Avenue became “Kilkenny Row.”  And a gang of tough kids sprang up called the “Kilkenny Cats,” with which my gang used to fight.

After the “Low Irish” came the “Dagoes” ... and after them the “Hunkies” ... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.

* * * * *

The Industrial Panic of ’95 (it was ’95, I think) was on ... always very poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was scarce in the house.

I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished.  I had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen.  It used to lay an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.

* * * * *

My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory.  I didn’t like the dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean with his sleeve.  I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting through the green waters.  But the slates of most of the boys stunk vilely with their spittle.

I didn’t like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either.  There was a close soapiness about them that offended me.  And yet they attracted me.  For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging dresses.  I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of their cheeks.