There was a pigsty at the end of our alley against the gable of our house; but we never were rich enough to own a pig.  One of my earliest recollections is of extemporizing out of the pigsty one of the most familiar institutions in our town—­a pawn shop.  If anything was missing in the house, they could usually find it in pawn.

At the age of ten, I entered the parochial school of the Episcopal Church; but the pedagogue of that period delegated his pedagogy to a monitor, and the monitor to one of the biggest boys, and the school ran itself.  The only thing I remember about it is the daily rushes over the benches and seats, and the number of boys about my size I was pitted against in fistic battles.  At the close of my first school day I came home with one of my eyes discoloured and one sleeve torn out of my jacket, as a result of an encounter not down on the programme.  The ignominy of such a spectacle irritated my father, and I was thoroughly whipped for my inability to defend myself better.  It was an ex parte judgment which a look at the other fellow might have modified.

After a few weeks at school I begged my father to allow me to devote my mornings as well as my evenings to the selling of newspapers.  The extra work added a little to my income and preserved my looks.  If there was any misery in my life at this time I neither knew nor felt it.  I was living the life of the average boy of my neighbourhood, and had nothing to complain of.  Of course, I was in a chronic condition of hunger, but so was every other boy in the alley and on the street.  It was quite an event for me occasionally to go bird-nesting with the son of the chief baker of the town.  He usually brought a loaf along as toll.  My knowledge of the woods was better than his, for necessity took me there for fuel for our hearth.  Sometimes the baker’s son brought a companion of his class.  These boys were well-fed and well-clothed, and it was when we spent whole days together that I noticed the disparity.  They were “quality”—­the baker was called “Mr.,” wore a tall hat on Sundays, and led the psalm singing in the Presbyterian Church.  In the summer time, when the church windows were open, the leader’s voice could be heard a mile away.  My childish misgivings about the distribution of the good things of life were quieted in the Sunday School by the dictum:  “It is the will of God.”  My first knowledge of God was that He was a big man in the skies who dealt out to the church people good things and to others experiences to make them good.  The Bible was to me God’s book, and a thing to be handled reverently.  We had a copy, but it was coverless, loose and incomplete.  Every morning I used to take it tenderly in my hands and pretend to read some of it, “just for luck!” My Sunday School teacher informed me that work was a curse that God had put upon the world and from what I saw around me I naturally concluded that life was more of a curse than a blessing—­that was the theory.  My father, however, never seemed to be able to get enough of the curse to appease our hunger.