Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents.  I was nervous and timid.  Yet from reading of the people I admired—­ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories—­and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them.  Until I was nearly fourteen I let this desire take no more definite shape than day-dreams.  Then an incident happened that did me real good.  Having an attack of asthma, I was sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake.  On the stage-coach ride thither I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very much more competent and also much more mischievous.  I have no doubt they were good-hearted boys, but they were boys!  They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me.  The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.

The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me.  I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by training.  Accordingly, with my father’s hearty approval, I started to learn to box.  I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil, and certainly worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement whatever.  My first boxing-master was John Long, an ex-prize-fighter.  I can see his rooms now, with colored pictures of the fights between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, and Heenan and Sayers, and other great events in the annals of the squared circle.  On one occasion, to excite interest among his patrons, he held a series of “championship” matches for the different weights, the prizes being, at least in my own class, pewter mugs of a value, I should suppose, approximating fifty cents.  Neither he nor I had any idea that I could do anything, but I was entered in the lightweight contest, in which it happened that I was pitted in succession against a couple of reedy striplings who were even worse than I was.  Equally to their surprise and to my own, and to John Long’s, I won, and the pewter mug became one of my most prized possessions.  I kept it, and alluded to it, and I fear bragged about it, for a number of years, and I only wish I knew where it was now.  Years later I read an account of a little man who once in a fifth-rate handicap race won a worthless pewter medal and joyed in it ever after.  Well, as soon as I read that story I felt that that little man and I were brothers.