to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect
success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises. So
when I refused to be adopted by a rich old man, and clung to my
family in the slums, I was only following the rule; and I can tell it
without boasting, because it is no more to my credit than that I wake
refreshed after a night's sleep.

This suggests to me a summary of my virtues, through the exercise of
which I may be said to have attracted my good fortune. I find that I
have always given nature a chance, I have used my opportunities, and
have practised self-expression. So much my enemies will grant me; more
than this my friends cannot claim for me.

In the Dover Street days I did not philosophize about my private
character, nor about the immigrant and his ways. I lived the life, and
the moral took care of itself. And after Dover Street came Applepie
Alley, Letterbox Lane, and other evil corners of the slums of Boston,
till it must have looked to our neighbors as if we meant to go on
forever exploring the underworld. But we found a short-cut--we found a
short-cut! And the route we took from the tenements of the stifling
alleys to a darling cottage of our own, where the sun shines in at
every window, and the green grass runs up to our very doorstep, was
surveyed by the Pilgrim Fathers, who trans-scribed their field notes
on a very fine parchment and called it the Constitution of the United
States.

It was good to get out of Dover Street--it was better for the growing
children, better for my weary parents, better for all of us, as the
clean grass is better than the dusty pavement. But I must never forget
that I came away from Dover Street with my hands full of riches. I
must not fail to testify that in America a child of the slums owns the
land and all that is good in it. All the beautiful things I saw
belonged to me, if I wanted to use them; all the beautiful things I
desired approached me. I did not need to seek my kingdom. I had only
to be worthy, and it came to me, even on Dover Street. Everything that
was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the
conditions of my life on Dover Street. My friendships, my advantages
and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the
materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of
America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it
only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit f