tenement in which they lived together, Tembarom sleeping on a cot,
the world spread itself before him as a place to explore in search of
at least one meal a day. There was nothing to do but to explore it to
the best of his ten-year-old ability.

His father had died two years before his mother, and Tembarom had
vaguely felt it a relief. He had been a resentful, domestically
tyrannical immigrant Englishman, who held in contempt every American
trait and institution. He had come over to better himself, detesting
England and the English because there was "no chance for a man there,"
and, transferring his dislikes and resentments from one country to
another, had met with no better luck than he had left behind him.
This he felt to be the fault of America, and his family, which was
represented solely by Tembarom and his mother, heard a good deal
about it, and also, rather contradictorily, a good deal about the
advantages and superiority of England, to which in the course of six
months he became gloomily loyal. It was necessary, in fact, for him
to have something with which to compare the United States unfavorably.
The effect he produced on Tembarom was that of causing him, when he
entered the public school round the corner, to conceal with
determination verging on duplicity the humiliating fact that if he
had not been born in Brooklyn he might have been born in England.
England was not popular among the boys in the school. History had
represented the country to them in all its tyrannical rapacity and
bloodthirsty oppression of the humble free-born. The manly and
admirable attitude was to say, "Give me liberty or give me death"--
and there was the Fourth of July.

Though Tembarom and his mother had been poor enough while his father
lived, when he died the returns from his irregular odd jobs no longer