and who drove a lean mule very much the worse for age and wear, up and
down the furrows of his leaner fields the while he complained of "the
misery" in his breast. He was afflicted with slow consumption or thought
he was, which was just as effective, and in addition had hook-worm,
though that parasitic producer of hopeless tiredness was not yet
discovered and named.

Daniel Christopher, his eldest son, had been raised with scarcely any
education, having been put in a cotton mill at the age of seven, but
nevertheless he soon manifested himself as the brain of the family. For
four years he worked in the cotton mill, and then, because of his
unusual brightness, he had been given a place in the printing shop of
the Wickham Union, where he was so attractive to the slow-going
proprietor that he soon became foreman of the printing department and
then manager. He knew nothing of printing or newspapers at the time, but
the little contact he obtained here soon cleared his vision. He saw
instantly what the newspaper business was, and decided to enter it.
Later, as he grew older, he suspected that no one knew very much about
advertising as yet, or very little, and that he was called by God to
revise it. With this vision of a still wider field of usefulness in his
mind, he began at once to prepare himself for it, reading all manner of
advertising literature and practicing the art of display and effective
statement. He had been through such bitter things as personal fights
with those who worked under him, knocking one man down with a heavy iron
form key; personal altercation with his own father and mother in which
he frankly told them that they were failures, and that they had better
let him show them something about regulating their hopeless lives. He
had quarreled with his younger brothers, trying to dominate them, and
had succeeded in controlling the youngest, principally for the very good
reason that he had become foolishly fond of him; this younger brother he
later introduced into his advertising business. He had religiously saved
the little he had earned thus far, invested a part of it in the further
development of the Wickham _Union_, bought his father an eight acre
farm, which he showed him how to work, and finally decided to come to
New York to see if he could not connect himself with some important
advertising concern where he could learn something more about the one
thing that interested him. He was already married, and he