But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful
stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking,
flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths,
and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even
that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a
golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt
his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of
the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this
was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the
crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it
would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean
of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live
and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His
father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his
right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had
overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and
they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with
his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.
Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in
the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any
money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is
now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the
site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a
shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a
pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western
wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about