written has passed out of my being as completely as if he had never been
there, save for the records and files on my library shelves. It is easy,
therefore, for me to write of him as a personality apart: in fact, I
could not depict him from any other point of view. To write of him in
the first person, as if he were myself, is impossible, for he is not.

The title suggests my principal reason for writing the book. Every life
has some interest and significance; mine, perhaps, a special one. Here
was a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to
make himself understood or even to know what persons were saying; his
education was extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by
some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write, for a period of
years, to the largest body of readers ever addressed by an American
editor--the circulation of the magazine he edited running into figures
previously unheard of in periodical literature. He made no pretense to
style or even to composition: his grammar was faulty, as it was natural
it should be, in a language not his own. His roots never went deep, for
the intellectual soil had not been favorable to their growth;--yet, it
must be confessed, he achieved.

But how all this came about, how such a boy, with every disadvantage to
overcome, was able, apparently, to "make good"--this possesses an
interest and for some, perhaps, a value which, after all, is the only
reason for any book.

EDWARD W. BOK
MERION, PENNSYLVANIA, 1920