the world around me. Given health and standing-room,
I should have worked out my salvation even on a desert island. Being
set down in the garden of America, where opportunity waits on
ambition, I was bound to make my days a triumphal march toward my
goal. The most unfriendly witness of my life will not venture to deny
that I have been successful. For aside from subordinate desires for
greatness or wealth or specific achievement, my chief ambition in life
has been _to live_, and I have lived. A glowing life has been mine,
and the fires that blazed highest in all my days were kindled on Dover
Street.

I have never had a dull hour in my life; I have never had a livelier
time than in the slums. In all my troubles I was thrilled through and
through with a prophetic sense of how they were to end. A halo of
romance floated before every to-morrow; the wings of future
adventures rustled in the dead of night. Nothing could be quite common
that touched my life, because I had a power for attracting uncommon
things. And when my noblest dreams shall have been realized I shall
meet with nothing finer, nothing more remote from the commonplace,
than some of the things that came into my life on Dover Street.

Friends came to me bearing noble gifts of service, inspiration, and
love. There came one, to talk with whom was to double the volume of
life. She left roses on my pillow when I lay ill, and in my heart she
planted a longing for greatness that I have yet to satisfy. Another
came whose soul was steeped in sunshine, whose eyes saw through every
pretence, whose lips mocked nothing holy. And one came who carried the
golden key that unlocked the last secret chamber of life for me.
Friends came trooping from everywhere, and some were poor, and some
were rich, but all were devoted and true; and they left no niche in my
heart unfilled, and no want unsatisfied.

To be alive in America, I found out long ago, is to ride on the
central current of the river of modern life; and to have a conscious
purpose is to hold the rudder that steers the ship of fate. I was
alive to my finger tips, back there on Dover Street, and all my
girlish purposes served one main purpose. It would have been amazing
if I had stuck in the mire of the slum. By every law of my nature I
was bound to soar above it, to attain the fairer places that wait for
every emancipated immigrant.

A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that
he is not content