BEFORE Our college days Margaret brought me up along with the children. I have before me a picture of our oldest, among twenty-one other American boys and girls strains of fifteen nations and a dozen creeds and races in a Manhattan schoolroom. Indian, Negro, and Turkish offspring happen to be in the group; likewise remnants of four ancient cultures: Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Moslem. For years these twenty-two American children have been moulded there. Their Their social growth has been so gradual that they are unaware of ever having been brought up. And, despite their vastly varied background, they have melted into a national type unknowingly. But I was aware though there was no tempest in the melting pot when that boy of mine was being brought up; and more so, even, when I myself For I was of age when my social growth suddenly started.

was.

For twenty years I had been alone, a self-sufficient child and youth, hiding myself among mature men, never confiding in anybody, and, therefore, never getting quite hatched, socially. I was mulish when others led me. For I was a leader not of others, but of myself.

The warm contacts of childhood and adolescence I never knew. My years at child labor in Denmark were secluded, though not at all tedious. I was

I

always capable of entertaining myself: by watching my fingers make and break things; by letting my senses - they were animal in purity-snatch whiff's of beauty out of mother earth; by talking to myself.

and

My years at sea I also lived alone: in the stokehold, fighting the fires; in the forecastle, reading the Bible and a thousand novels; on shore leave, sightseeing. I liked my own company immensely, and lived aloof. Yet I was not a snob or a sissy. In tropical gales I was sensuous, or when I watched the galloping paws of the engine. My mates had other tastes. Twice they joshed me; and on these two occasions I was 'sociable' in the manner of a sailor. For both times I made a wager both times I won that I could drink any of them under the table. After the first spree that took place at a coal pier in Baltimore before I was seventeen - I even leaped overboard for a swim. Baltimore beer was the first medium, and Jamaica rum the second. To be frank, I lost my dignity after the second spree by poking my head through too small a porthole- 'to watch a shark,' I told the stokers later - and finding myself thoroughly trapped. The 'sociable' ones of the crew did their best, hauling at my legs, before the Chief came to my rescue with chisel and hacksaw.

did. Herd habits took root in my primitive heart and sprouted vigorously. They took me by surprise, first as a vague encroachment, then as a blurring fungus growth, on my sharply focused senses, then as a merging of my tongue and eyes with the rest of myself, and finally as a merging of myself with society. There was no longer a cleavage. I lost my tongue and eyes. My own private language is almost dead. The whole of me began to talk and not only to myself, but to others. I metamorphosed with blinding speed, so that momentum threw me beyond the line. Perhaps it oversocialized me. Compassion almost hurled me out on a tangent.

we

She had learned to speak her native language well while she worked as housemaid at the age of fourteen. It was her cultured tongue that I loved first. Later, at college, -as romped through the fields and forests of Minnesota, I often marveled at her ease among learned professors. Even our 'Prexy,' and his hospitable wife, on two memorable Christmas Eves, delighted in conversing with her. And she chummed with the wives of two deans. How I admired these quiet, kind, cultured Americans!

But I also fell in love with her teeth, and with her tiny hands, and with her fleet foot. She still wins the picnic races. Children worshiped her at first sight. She was faunlike something

of a Minnehaha in form and spirit. Her laughter had a rare, joyous quality. Her eyes were sympathetic, with a tinge of sadness in them. The loss of 'the dearest of fathers,' more even than the burden put on her young shoulders thereby, gave her an understanding heart, and made her eyes and voice soothing. She brightened the boarding house from basement to garret. And her charm lasted.

When I began to earn my living here in the new world, I first lived among sailors in cheap rooming houses above the saloons near the Red Hook water front, where whispers about boys being 'shanghaied' often reached my ear, and where my eyes beheld the stokers on incoming steamers being plundered by runners. Later I invaded the streets that skirted Columbia Heights, and shared a parlor with many a lodger, once with a child of a crowded Polish family. These were the castaway homes of wealthy Americans - brownstone, parlor-and-basement houses with high frescoed ceilings, Baltimore heaters, and porcelain lavatories.

In one of these I rented a garret from Margaret's mother. And it was a garret worth describing in detail, for there I first beheld my wife-to-be. Words fail to picture its charm. A long table straddled across the trapdoor above the garret stairs. I had to crawl to get into my garret. At the rear gable two chimneys, warm and blushing, met at the roof-just the nook for my parrots, which an old stoker mate had brought from Brazil. There they lived between the chimneys, climbing a heavy wire mesh which I nailed up in front, Adam praying Spanish and Eve swearing Danish, and both singing 'In the shade of the old chim-mi-ney.'

On the floor, on a burlap carpet, the two best books in the world-my illustrated Bible and its mate, Webster's unabridged dictionary - leaned

on each other. A pair of quaint rockers, done in black and orange, stood at the ends of the table, which was covered with wool-embroidered burlap, upon which flickered a red candle, stuck into a benedictine bottle. On a collar beam above, and directly under a skylight, hung a brass chandelier, with two tiny blue beady gas flames burning.

From gable to gable ran two rows of prim queen-posts, yoked above by collar beams and steadied below by struts, and meeting the rafters halfway up the roof. Shelves with yards and yards of ownerless books filled the spaces between these queen-posts and formed the sides of my garret. Along the top of the shelves a white yacht raced a tarred two-masted schooner; and an alabaster Apollo chased Daphne within my first baby shirt; and the purple hose of a Turkish pipe embraced a copper jardinière brimful of dry tobacco leaves; and the broad shoulders of a jug of 'Guinea Red' carried a spherical tumbler turned upside down.

Stuck into a crack on one of the shelves was a blue-and-white porcelain shard - perhaps a part of a broken platter - depicting, if I remember right, two lovers fleeing in a boat on the river; and over their heads two birds, stealing kisses on the wing; and on an isle in the river a bower; and on the mainland a Chinese mansion with a garret; and between the isle and the mainland a bridge, at the foot of which tilted a weeping willow, and over which ran two armed detectives and a pigtailed judge, reading a frightful law book.

In the front gable of my garret was a round window into which the lone morning star smiled like the tear in an eye; and under it a cot. Beyond, God was in his Heaven with the angels.

I repeat, the first time I put eye on Margaret was in my garret. One

afternoon I hurried home for my books, which I had forgotten in the morning and which I needed at Cooper Union. The house was empty, but the trapdoor of my garret was open. She was on her knees, scrubbing, and also looking at pictures in my forty-pound Bible. Her hair was fastened up with the charm of a young girl who expects no callers. I stood on the garret stairs under the table with my head above the trapdoor. And I dared not crawl up to her, for she had not heard me climb the steps. But suddenly she knew that I was there. She turned her face toward me and stared as though I had risen from the dead. I explained my errand. 'God!' she gasped. 'I thought it was Father.' I did not know then that her father was dead, or that he had fallen off a roof down upon an iron fence. He had been a roofer. Hurriedly I fetched my books and bowed myself down under the table and down the garret stairs. But after our first meeting my attic was complete in beauty. My heart throve in the joy of living there.

On her sixteenth birthday her mother invited the roomers and boarders to the party. I remember a young rival there, who worked as draftsman in a stoneyard, sketching details for the subway. After that night I wanted to be a draftsman. He was the gamest of sports; and he honored me, there in public, by having me check his sketches of a circular pitch of the Hudson Terminal Station. I did this mathematically, and my pleasure was intense, for it was the only time I ever helped to build a subway.

Other men at the party became my lifelong friends: a bricklayer with a glass eye, who then and almost ever after earned more a day than I a week; a ruddy, bald-headed baker, who bubbled over with mirth, because he was slightly soused; a pale, emaciated

peddler of spiritual pamphlets, called 'the Prophet,' who literally lived on cold baths, peanuts, and prayers; an effeminate masseur with spats on his ankles, a lavender band on his hat, and a watch on his wrist.

Margaret's childhood friends were also there. I remember a bright highschool boy - 'Doc' they called himwho drove an ice wagon after school hours and now is a noted physician. Never shall I forget a picnic where he blistered my tongue with a wild radish. At the party Margaret's hand touched him to the quick as he stole a kiss. 'Starfish,' she called him, because her fingers left the print of one crawling on his cheek.

Roomers and boarders grouped themselves in a parlor nook to smoke cigars and sip coffee. But I mingled with young and old, for Margaret was everywhere. I played forfeit games and told puns, threw peanut shells and sang ragtime. I gazed through a coat sleeve while 'Doc' poured water into it. 'Starfishing,' he called the game. Blindfolded I knelt on the floor and swore allegiance to the flag while I bounced my fist, until a girl slid a pan of water under it. I tore half a sleeve off Margaret's party dress while my teeth picked a match from her puckering lips.

III

Margaret was warned against the sailor in the garret, but the warnings fanned her girlish curiosity into flame. I met her but seldom alone, and could not declare my intentions in front of others.

When I was away she tidied my garret. The air there was full of fragrance from her scrubbing brush, her sun-bleached linen sheets, her oil mop, and a dust cap that she once forgot, which I revered as a fetish. Only during my absence did she crawl into my

garret. The ever-toiling widow, being the wise mother of a fair daughter, was not a little worried about males in general and sailors in particular. She and her God brought up the five children, for there was no mother's pension in those days. Margaret was twelve- and the oldest - when one day the idyllic home was suddenly swept away. A slip of a foot — a grasp at a rotten shingle- a widow - a rooming house-a daughter — and a foreign sailor, who had sailed sixtyseven thousand miles to find just this garret! What years of sorrows and of joys because of a rotten shingle!

One night I met Margaret on the lower stairway. I struck a match and held it over our heads. She was holding a hand on her heart. I stepped back and remarked in a tone which assured her that she was no child: 'I would never hurt you in all my life.' She stood staring at me with a strange mist in her eyes. The match died out. You do look like Father," she gasped, and rushed by before I had time to propose marriage. I would take no chance waiting, though I earned only a dollar a day.

On another occasion I fared better. She was taking off her wraps as I entered the hall. She tried to run, but decided to stay. I approached, bowing, and implied that I would be no more intrusive than she herself allowed, giving her time to regain her poise. But I stumbled on a carpet hole and my books flew out from under my arms. She chuckled while she helped me pick them up. Then we stood eyeing each other with tacit intimacy. "You like books?' she asked. 'Yes, I like books. Will you marry me?' Her hand leaped to her thumping heart. I almost dodged. The motion reminded me of 'Doc' at the party. Without answering she skipped past me and vanished.