this, with a sense of grim humor, caused him, I suppose, to check
his children off with the Latin numerals, as it were. The sixth
was baptized Sextus, the ninth Nonus, though they were not called
so, and he was dissuaded from calling the twelfth Duodecimus only
by the certainty that the other boys would miscall him "Dozen." How
I escaped Tertius I don't know. Probably the scheme had not been
thought of then. Poor father! Of the whole fourteen but one lived
to realize his hopes of a professional career, only to die when
he had just graduated from the medical school. My oldest brother
went to sea; Sophus, the doctor, was the next; and I, when it came
my time to study in earnest, refused flatly and declared my wish
to learn the carpenter's trade. Not till thirty years after did
I know how deep the wound was I struck my father then. He had set
his heart upon my making a literary career, and though he was very
far from lacking sympathy with the workingman--I rather think that
he was the one link between the upper and lower strata in our town
in that way, enjoying the most hearty respect of both--yet it was
a sad disappointment to him. It was in 1893, when I saw him for
the last time, that I found it out, by a chance remark he dropped
when sitting with my first book, "How the Other Half Lives," in
his hand, and also the sacrifice he had made of his own literary
ambitions to eke out by hack editorial work on the local newspaper
a living for his large family. As for me, I would have been repaid
for the labor of writing a thousand books by witnessing the pride
he took in mine. There was at last a man of letters in the family,
though he came by a road not down on the official map.

[Illustration: Father.]

Crying over spilt milk was not my father's fashion, however. If I