A few days later father sold our little cottage home and furnishings and we moved into the only hotel in the little town. Schools were few and far between for poor children then. I played around the hotel all day, running wild, till father came home from work. He would have his dinner, read a paper, and then put me to bed. After that he would read a book for an hour and go to bed himself. We lived this way for almost a year. Some nights he would put down his book and look at me strangely for minutes at a time. I was a problem, undoubtedly, and he was trying to decide what to do with me. A ten-year-old boy without a mother is a fit problem for any father’s mind, and my father was a thoughtful man.

Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds till at last it finds lodgment in some cozy fence corner. When I left school at fourteen I was as unsophisticated as a boy could be. I knew no more of the world and its strange way than the gentle, saintly woman who taught me my prayers in the convent.