ing the
small sum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling
himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence
schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and
scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the
work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a
collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his
daily training--an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame
through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble
clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of
the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls
of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at
his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules
and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an
important Eastern railroad. It was shortly after he had won this place
that he met my mother."

The caressing fondness with which he uttered the last word imparted to
his seemingly supreme beauty an added warmth of appeal.

"Her, too, you have met in the Advertising Columns. She had begun to
teach school when a mere girl; but when her father's death threw upon
her young shoulders the burden of three little children and a helpless
mother, she had risen to her greater needs. She succeeded in quadrupling
her income by learning to write short stories, criticism, and verse,
from a literary bureau which charged her a nominal fee for instruction
and purchased her output at extremely generous rates for disposal among
the leading magazines. When my father first saw her--it was in the
course of a Fourth of July excursion to Niagara Falls which, including a
three days' stay at the best hotels, was offered to the public at half
the usual cost--she had sent the eldest boy through college, her younger
sister was teaching school, and she was free to follow the inclinations
of her heart."

"You were fortunate in the selection of your immediate ancestry," said
Harding.

"Was I not?" Pinckney responded in a flush of grateful recognition. "But
that is not all. The house in which I was born, though generally
recognized as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in
reinforced concrete, was put up by my father, unassisted, from plans
which he purchased for a ridiculously small sum. Its every nook was the
abiding-place of love, of qu