“Well, Matthew,” the old man would remark, after they had discussed Dr. Pound’s latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of man, or horticulture, or the Republican Party, “do you have any better news of Hugh at school?”

“I regret to say, Mr. Durrett,” my father would reply, “that he does not yet seem to be aroused to a sense of his opportunities.”

Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me with a blue eye that lurked beneath grizzled brows, quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an iron tool.  I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in their company.  They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of another sort who could never understand them,—­nor they me.  To what depths of despair they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were doing it all for my good!  They only managed to convince me that my love of folly was ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first for perdition.  I always looked, during these excruciating and personal moments, at the coloured glass bottle.

“It grieves me to hear it, Hugh,” Mr. Durrett invariably declared.  “You’ll never come to any good without study.  Now when I was your age...”

I knew his history by heart, a common one in this country, although he made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one.  And when I contrast him with those of his successors whom I was to know later...!  But I shall not anticipate.  American genius had not then evolved the false entry method of overcapitalization.  A thrilling history, Mr. Durrett’s, could I but have entered into it.  I did not reflect then that this stern old man must have throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still remained in his bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a city.  Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that lighted the southern sky were the result of a passion, of dreams similar to those possessing me, but which I could not express.  He had founded a family whose position was virtually hereditary, gained riches which for those days were great, compelled men to speak his name with a certain awe.  But of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality compelled him to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches to bring?

No, I didn’t want to be an iron-master.  But it may have been about this time that I began to be impressed with the power of wealth, the adulation and reverence it commanded, the importance in which it clothed all who shared in it....

The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom I was brought up was called Densmore Academy, a large, square building of a then hideous modernity, built of smooth, orange-red bricks with threads of black mortar between them.  One reads of happy school days, yet I fail to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the yard, which was covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell.  I think of it as a penitentiary, and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance to this impression.