It is a wonderful inner personal satisfaction to reach the point when a man can say:  “I have enough.”  His soul and character are refreshed by it:  he is made over by it.  He begins a new life! he gets a sense of a new joy; he feels, for the first time, what a priceless possession is that thing that he never knew before, freedom.  And if he seeks that freedom at the right time, when he is at the summit of his years and powers and at the most opportune moment in his affairs, he has that supreme satisfaction denied to so many men, the opposite of which comes home with such cruel force to them; that they have overstayed their time:  they have worn out their welcome.

There is no satisfaction that so thoroughly satisfies as that of going while the going is good.

Still——­

The friends of Edward Bok may be right when they said he made a mistake in his retirement.

However——­

As Mr. Dooley says:  “It’s a good thing, sometimes, to have people size ye up wrong, Hinnessey:  it’s whin they’ve got ye’er measure ye’re in danger.”

Edward Bok’s friends have failed to get his measure,—­yet!

They still have to learn what he has learned and is learning every day:  “the joy,” as Charles Lamb so aptly put it upon his retirement, “of walking about and around instead of to and fro.”

* * * * *

The question now naturally arises, having read this record thus far:  To what extent, with his unusual opportunities of fifty years, has the Americanization of Edward Bok gone?  How far is he, to-day, an American?  These questions, so direct and personal in their nature, are perhaps best answered in a way more direct and personal than the method thus far adopted in this chronicle.  We will, therefore, let Edward Bok answer these questions for himself, in closing this record of his Americanization.

CHAPTER XXI

WHERE AMERICA FELL SHORT WITH ME

When I came to the United States as a lad of six, the most needful lesson for me, as a boy, was the necessity for thrift.  I had been taught in my home across the sea that thrift was one of the fundamentals in a successful life.  My family had come from a land (the Netherlands) noted for its thrift; but we had been in the United States only a few days before the realization came home strongly to my father and mother that they had brought their children to a land of waste.

Where the Dutchman saved, the American wasted.  There was waste, and the most prodigal waste, on every hand.  In every street-car and on every ferry-boat the floors and seats were littered with newspapers that had been read and thrown away or left behind.  If I went to a grocery store to buy a peck of potatoes, and a potato rolled off the heaping measure, the groceryman, instead of picking it up, kicked it into the gutter for the wheels of his wagon