Early in our occupancy of the Second Avenue house, the back parlour had to be rented as a doctor’s office, and shortly after my mother decided that it was her duty to take in boarders. I cannot speak of my mother as she was during these trials without the deepest emotion. There is nobody to whom I owe so much; there was no debt which so profoundly affected my entire career. In Mannheim her position had always been one of comfort. I had seen her there with good friends, good books, good dramas, and good music; she was the mistress of a commodious house, with a corps of competent servants, in a city with every custom and tradition of which she was intimately familiar; respected by the community, the mother of thirteen children, she was calm, philosophic, considerate of every domestic call upon her, not only supervising our education, physical and mental, but also finding time to add continuously to her own broad culture. Now a complete change had come. She was a stranger in a strange land; most of her friends were new; the city of her husband’s adoption was a puzzle, its manners foreign, its language long almost unknown; there was small time for amusement; there was, on the contrary, the ever-constant and ever-pressing strain of helping, by her own endeavours, to make both ends meet. All of this deeply affected my young and impressionable mind. I feared lest my mother, who was my idol, and who was so superior in accomplishments and knowledge to the people that boarded with us, might, in the course of her duties, be compelled to render quasi-menial services. Luckily, two things prevented this. On the one hand, her wonderful poise and tact and her extraordinarily sweet nature won so prompt a recognition that the least gentle of our lodgers instinctively became worshippers at her shrine. On the other hand, my sisters, themselves bred to comfort, rivalled one another in a friendly struggle to shield her from every possible annoyance. High-spirited girls as they were, they did not hesitate to assume everything that might in any way hurt her sensibilities, and their devotion and self-sacrifice are among my tenderest memories. Appreciating how things were at home, I became quickly reconciled to abandoning textbook education, and instead, to plunging into the rough school of life. The influence of the beautiful spirit of my mother had early given me good ideals and a love of purity, and the ebb of the family fortunes developed an irrepressible ambition to accomplish four things: to restore my mother to the comforts to which she had been accustomed; to save myself from an old age of financial stress such as my father’s; to give my own children the chances in life that were all but denied to me, and to try to attain a standard of thought and conduct consonant with the fine concepts that characterized my mother’s mind and lips.