keen with you, my dear boy, as it has been with me and that you may have
life on as easy terms as I have. With this foreword I will begin the
record in more detail.

I have spoken of my good luck. It began in my being born on a farm, of
parents in the prime of their days, and in humble circumstances. I deem
it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so many
other things find it good to begin life. Father probably tapped the
sugar bush about this time or a little earlier; the bluebird and the
robin and song sparrow may have arrived that very day. New calves were
bleating in the barn and young lambs under the shed. There were earth-
stained snow drifts on the hillside, and along the stone walls and
through the forests that covered the mountains the coat of snow showed
unbroken. The fields were generally bare and the frost was leaving the
ground. The stress of winter was over and the warmth of spring began to
be felt in the air. I had come into a household of five children, two
girls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two. One had
died in infancy, making me the seventh child. Mother was twenty-nine and
father thirty-five, a medium-sized, freckled, red-haired man, showing
very plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did mother, who
was a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side. I had come
into a family of neither wealth nor poverty as those things were looked
upon in those days, but a family dedicated to hard work winter and
summer in paying for and improving a large farm, in a country of wide
open valleys and long, broad-backed hills and gentle flowing mountain
lines; very old geologically, but only one generation from the stump in
the history of the settlement. Indeed, the stumps lingered in many of
the fields late into my boyhood, and one of my tasks in the dry mid-
spring weather was to burn these stumps--an occupation I always enjoyed
because the adventure of it made play of the work. The climate was