and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon
him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his native
speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father
and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to
parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de Dytchman's
house." He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of
school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back
to it. He regarded his father's business as part of his national
disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and
informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.
When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen,
he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar
till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl
whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an
American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had
been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,
fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;
and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so