He can also, without seeming in the least conceited, tell how, through his clear-sighted firmness in refusing to write in the Spencerian manner prescribed in school, he succeeded in bringing the Principal and the whole Board of Education to their senses, resulting in a complete reversal of the public-school policy in the matter of handwriting instruction.

The Horatio Alger note is dominant throughout the story of young Edward’s boyhood.  His cheerfulness and business sagacity so impressed everyone with whom he came in contact that he was soon outdistancing all the other boys in the process of self-advancement.  And no one is more smilingly tolerant of the irresistible progress of young Edward Bok in making friends and money than Edward Bok the impersonal author of the book.  He just loves to see the young boy get ahead.

* * * * *

It will perhaps aid in getting an idea of the personality and confident presence of the Boy Bok to state that he was a feverish collector of autographs.  Whenever any famous personage came to town the young man would find out at what hotel he was staying and would proceed to hound him until he had got him to write his name, with some appropriate sentiment, in a little book.  In advertising the present volume the publishers give a list of names of historical characters who feature in Mr. Bok’s reminiscences—­Gens.  Grant and Garfield, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson and dozens of others.  And so they do figure in the book, but as victims of the young Dutch boy’s passion for autographs.  Still, perhaps, they did not mind, for the author gives us to understand that they were all so charmed with the prepossessing manner and intelligent bearing of the young autograph hound that they not only were continually asking him to dinner (he usually timed his visit so as to catch them just as they were entering the dining-room) but insisted on giving him letters of introduction to their friends.

Only Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson neglected to register extreme pleasure at being approached by the smiling lad.  Both Mrs. Lincoln and Emerson were failing in their minds at the time, however, which satisfactorily explains their coolness, at least for the author.  In Mrs. Lincoln’s case an attempt was made to interest her in an autographed photograph of Gen. Grant.  But “Edward saw that the widow of the great Lincoln did not mentally respond to his pleasure in his possession.”  Could it have been possible that the widow of the great Lincoln was a trifle bored?

The account of the intrusion on Emerson in Concord borders on the sacrilegious.  Here was the venerable philosopher, five months before his death, when his great mind had already gone on before him, being visited by a strange lad with a passion for autographs, who sat and watched for those lucid moments when then sun would break through the clouded brain, making it possible for Emerson to hold the pen and form the letters of his name.  Then young Edward was off, with another trophy in his belt and another stride made in his progress toward Americanization.  Lovers of Emerson could wish that the impersonal editor of these memoirs had omitted the account of this victory.