vitally affect large communities. My astuteness has put millions into
totally unexpected pockets and defeated the faultily expressed
intentions of many a testator. I can go to the White House and get an
immediate hearing, and I can do more than that with judges of the
Supreme Court in their private chambers.

In other words I am an active man of affairs, a man among men, a man of
force and influence, who, as we say, "cuts ice" in the metropolis. But
the economic weakness in the situation lies in the fact that a boiled
egg only costs the ordinary citizen ten cents and it costs me almost its
weight in gold.

Compare this de-luxe existence of mine with that of my forebears. We are
assured by most biographers that the subject of their eulogies was born
of poor but honest parents. My own parents were honest, but my father
was in comfortable circumstances and was able to give me the advantages
incident to an education, first at the local high school and later at
college. I did not as a boy get up while it was still dark and break the
ice in the horsetrough in order to perform my ablutions. I was, to be
sure, given to understand--and always when a child religiously
believed--that this was my father's unhappy fate. It may have been so,
but I have a lingering doubt on the subject that refuses to be
dissipated. I can hardly credit the idea that the son of the village
clergyman was obliged to go through any such rigorous physical
discipline as a child.

Even in 1820 there were such things as hired men and tradition declares
that the one in my grandparents' employ was known as Jonas, had but one
good eye and was half-witted. It modestly refrains from asserting that
he had only one arm and one leg. My grandmother did the cooking--her
children the housework; but Jonas was their only servant, if servant he
can be called. It is said that he could perform wonders with an ax and
could whistle the very birds off the trees.

Some time ago I came upon a trunkful of letters written by my
grandfather to my father in 1835, when the latter was in college. They
were closely written with a fine pen in a small, delicate hand, and the
lines of ink, though faded, were like steel engraving. They were
stilted, godly--in an ingenuous fashion--at times ponderously humorous,
full of a mild self-satisfaction, and inscribed under the obvious
impression that only the writer could save my father's soul from hell or
his kidneys from destruction. The good