o Denver in the spring of 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly
inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm--undersized and weakly, so
that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so
unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story
Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living
with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee,
where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join
my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their
permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us,
because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph
system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old
forty-niner with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo
on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not
precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the
journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should
recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street.

My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in
my bringing up. My father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the
Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, Indiana, to be educated;
and there, to be sure, I read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be
a saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mortify the flesh,"
because I was told that a good priest, Father Hudson--whom I all but
worshipped--used to do so. But even at Notre Dame, and much more in
Denver, I was homesick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to
return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant relatives. They
sent me to a Baptist school till I was seventeen. And when I was
recalled to Denver, because of the failure of my father's health, I
went to work to help earn for the household, with no strong attachment
for any church and with no recognized membership in any.

I suppose there is no one who does not look back upon his past and
wonder what he should have become in life if this or that crucial event
had not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me that if it had not
been for the sudden death of my father I, too, might have found our
jungle beast a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without
realizing what I was about. I should have been a lawyer, I know; for I
had had the ambition from my earliest boyhood, and I had been confirmed
in it by my success