Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmother from the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, dark and dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Once she had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one could think of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her one could easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty had its place too. At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when the fancy of my own flesh-and-blood father, down on the floor of the barn, was giving me a birthright of decaying Germanic gentlefolk the dark old woman who was my grandmother was more in my line. And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to do with the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you will perceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, is a product, I believe, of the South. By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a place called Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace that have appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was one of the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they were first married. Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is a tradition of his having been a merchant, and of course there were not, at that time, so many children. One could get up and out more easily. Moving, perhaps at night, from town to town, to escape bill collectors, was not so difficult. And then I fancy that, at first his own people, from time to time, sent him money. However, I know little of his people and only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earned it or of his having made it by his shrewdness. And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in a small Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden, Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Harding once played in the same brass band at Caledonia. He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail to catch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the town’s main street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over the sidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harness hanging on the shop walls and, in the morning when the sun crept in, the brass and nickel buckles would shine like jewels. Young farmers coming in with great work harnesses on their shoulders and throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor--the rich pungent smell of leather--an old man, a workman, a harness-maker, sitting on his horse and sewing a strap--on the floor by the stove a wooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visiting farmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit--