T. TEMBAROM

by Frances Hodgson Burnett




CHAPTER I:


The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know
what the "T." stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in
reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter
have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost
inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and
pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His
surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural
tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and
the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled
itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. By much less inevitable
processes have surnames evolved themselves as centuries rolled by.
Tembarom liked it, and soon almost forgot he had ever been called
anything else.

His education really began when he was ten years old. At that time
his mother died of pneumonia, contracted by going out to sew, at
seventy-five cents a day, in shoes almost entirely without soles,
when the remains of a blizzard were melting in the streets. As, after
her funeral, there remained only twenty-five cents in the shabby
bureau which was one of the few articles furnishing the room in the