who builds, contrives and constructs, is joined to
a woman into whose soul of wholesome refinement come images of dainty
beauty, where they glow and grow radiant. With lavish unrestraint the
life of this French woman pours itself into her sons. The third child
died in infancy. The eldest survived his mother by some thirteen years.
The youngest is a constructive mechanical engineer. The second son is
Harold Bell Wright.

"During ten years this mother and this son live in rare intimacy. The
boy's first enduring impression of this life is the vision of the mother
bending affectionately over him while criticising the water color sketch
his unpracticed fingers had just made. Crude blendings and faulty
lines were pointed out, then touched into harmony and more accurate
perspective by her quick skill. Together their eyes watched shades dance
on sunny slopes, cloud shadows race among the hills or lie lazily in the
valley below.

"Exuberant Nature and ebullient boy loved each other from the first.
Alone, enravished, he often wandered far in sheer joy of living. He
brings, one day, from his rambles a bunch of immortelles which mother
graciously receives. Twenty years later the boy, man-grown, bows
reverently over a box of withered flowers--the same bouquet the mother
took that day and laid away as a precious memento of his boyish love.
Such was the first decade.

"A ten-year-old boy, motherless, steals from harsh labor and yet harsher
surroundings, runs to the home of sacred memories, clambers to the
attic, and spends the night in anguished solitude. This was his first
Gethsemane. For ten years buffeted and beaten, battling with adversity,
sometimes losing but never lost, snatching learning here and there,
hating sham, loving passionately, misunderstood, misapprehended, too
stubbornly proud to ask apologies or make useless explanations, fighting
poverty in the depths of privation, wrestling existence from toil he
loathed, befriending many and also befriended much, but always face to
face with the grim tragedy which has held part of the stage since Eden.

"Such was the second decade. The first was spent on hill sides where
shadows only made the light more buoyant as they fled away. The second
was passed in the valley where the shadow hung lazily till the cloud
grew very black and drenched the soil.

"Lured to college, he undertook to acquire academic culture. As is
well known, college life with its professorial anecdotes and