seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it
would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean
of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live
and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His
father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his
right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had
overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and
they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with
his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.
Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in
the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any
money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is
now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the
site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a
shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a
pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western
wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about
when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave
"her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could.
This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood,
though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in
washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made
Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and
his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on
Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was
a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets
and they went through English literature together.

Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street
was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable
and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be
deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and,
lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express
companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting
fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.
In between the clerk was a dead but skilled