I would come near to him he would fade away into the greyness of the earth and the sky, and it was pressed in upon my soul that I should be as that grey man—a minister of the most high God and a servant of the people; and so it came to pass. The grey witch was my bane by night; the grey man was my blessing by day.

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CHAPTER VI

MY DISGRACE AT SCHOOL

HEN I was about six years old I suffered what seemed to me a shameful wrong. I was seized

by violent hands and, in spite of screams and kickings, I was dragged away to what was to me a prison house and a torture chamber. I was sent to school, literally sent. No healthy child of six ever went to school of his own accord; he had to be dragged or driven there.

And the instincts of the rebellious boy were sane and sound; he had no call to be in a school, at least in such a school as was provided for him in the mid-nineteenth century. In these schools a mere child, a baby, was compelled to sit still on a hard bench hour after hour and listen to weary children under the rod of exasperated teachers, droning their a, b, c; spelling c-a-t, cat; d-o-g, dog, and if a little boy or girl failed to spell aright, his or her little hands were blistered with the rod.

From the very first day of my incarceration in this place of torment, I was in rebellion against it. Instead of being a good boy and attending to my letters, I was for ever gazing through the open door and the open window out into that world of freedom and beauty from which I had been snatched away. Instead of watching those ugly things called letters and the pages of my book, I was gazing at the dragon clouds floating through the sky, and listening to the drone of dragon-flies floating above the flowers. The outer region of the sky and the earth was so lovely and so interesting, the inner region of the school so ugly

and forlorn, that I adored the one and despised the other. As a consequence, I was a trial to my teacher and a sorrow to my mother. It seemed to me that my mother and my teacher were in a conspiracy to compel me to learn my letters. I set my will against their will. I flatly refused to learn my letters. I was whipped in school and I was whipped at home because I would not learn my letters.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, how my teacher, who was my Cousin Sidney, took me into a dark closet of the school, in which the girls hung their hats and cloaks -how I hate to this day the smell of girls' hats and cloaks! —and there, after whipping me until my body was stinging with the striping of the whip and my soul aflame with anger, my Cousin Sidney told me, with tears running down her cheeks, that it hurt her more than it hurt me for her to whip me as she did; at which in my inner soul I laughed sardonically, for if it hurt her why didn't she stop? She told me that I would grow up in ignorance. I would break my mother's heart and make my father poor buying me first readers. I went out from that closet with the evil smell of girls' hats and cloaks in my nostrils and with black despair in my heart.

When Cousin Sidney came home, for she lived with us, she cried and told my mother, and my mother cried and whipped me again; and all this bother because I would not learn my letters. If they had only let me alone my letters would have learned themselves. I never did learn my letters. From constant iteration and reiteration on the part of the other children I learned my first reader by heart and could read it looking out of the window. This was also an offence for which I suffered punishment.

But confinement in school had its compensation; it gave added value to the freedom of the divine outdoors. With a shout of joy we escaped from the durance of school into the liberty of nature-the great teacher who taught us by

the seeing of the eye and the hearing of the ear, whose letter was the violet and the daffodil, and whose voice was the voice of the blue jay and the oriole.

I am told that children run to school to-day as we used to run away from it. I am glad of this, and yet I am afraid lest the instruction of the schools should usurp that instruction which is unlettered and cannot be printed on the pages of a book; that divine instruction which must be read directly from the pages of the earth and the sky; the letters of which are the flowers and the stars. And I am also afraid of that which we worship to-day as science, which seeks to make of nature a bond-slave of our industrial system, to sell her secrets as if she were a harlot, in the markets of the world.

When I was about eight years old my father removed from the town of Fairmount to the village of College Hill, where we resided for four years. During this period I learned my letters and mastered the rudiments of what is called education. Leaving College Hill at the expiration of the four years, we made our home in the city of Cincinnati.

While we were living in College Hill, my father gave the most of his time to an effort to create a pleasure park for the benefit of the people of Cincinnati; this to the neglect of his business. The scheme was a failure.

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CHAPTER VII

NECESSITY CALLS TO WORK

T this time anxiety was a guest in our household. My father could not easily recover his failing practice.

Our only certain source of income came from my grandfather's estate and this was dwindling away. There is nothing sadder in this sad world than the failing fortunes of a once well-to-do household. Day by day the ghost of want sits at table; clothing becomes shabby; food scanty; debts increase and friends fall away. The world says of the head of such a household, "He's a has-been." Success passes him by with a rush, and he must admit the sad fact of his failure and adjust himself to the conditions of that failure.

It was this low estate at home, together with my natural repulsion to the dullness and futility of my life at school, that moved me, one morning, to turn away from the road to the school and go down into the streets of the city in search of a job. Fifth Street was the centre of the larger retail business of Cincinnati. To this street I made my way, reaching the centre at about ten in the morning. At first I walked up and down the street, with my heart in my mouth, not daring to go into any of the stores that lined. the way. At last I summoned my courage, went into one door after another, gaining bravery with each rebuff, until I came to the dry-goods store of Cole and Hopkins, on the corner of Fifth and Pine. Entering this large establishment, I timidly approached a black-bearded man standing