We children did not lose a day in our pursuit of education; for on the very day of our removal to Manhattan, I attended Grammar School No. 18, in Fifty-first Street near Lexington Avenue. At recess-time we boys used to play “tag” on the foundations of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the construction of which had been stopped during the Civil War. I have very pleasant recollections of my early grammar school teachers, and especially of one who later was for years Clerk of the Board of Education, the efficient Lawrence D. Kiernan, who, while at School 18, was elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the “Young Democrats” and whose talks to us pupils on civic duty seemed like great orations and gave me my first impression of independence in politics. Nevertheless, I laboured under two disadvantages--one was my English; the difference in structure between my native and my adopted language gave me considerable trouble; so did the pronunciation of the letters _w_ and _d_, but my greatest difficulty was the diphthong _th_, and to overcome it, I compiled and learned lists of words in which it occurred and for weeks devoted some time, night and morning, to repeating: “Theophilus Thistle, the great thistle-sifter, sifted one sieve-full of unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb.” However, as the greatest stress was laid on proficiency in arithmetic, and as I had a natural aptitude for that study, my proficiency there balanced these deficiencies and took me into the highest class at the age of eleven. It was a general belief that all “Dutchmen” were cowards, and on the playground this idea was acted upon with considerable spirit. I was made the target of many a joke that I took in good part, until I realized that something positive was required of me. Then when a husky lad taunted me with being a “square-headed Dutchman,” and refused my demand that he “take it back,” my fighting blood was roused, and I administered a sound thrashing, the result of sheer, unscientific force. Nothing evokes the admiration of the gallant Irish so much as a good fight, and the result of that battle was the liking of my comrades, and especially one of the leaders among them, John F. Carroll, later familiar to New Yorkers as a leader in Tammany. About this time I made up my mind to enter City College and, to prepare for that, I began looking about for a school which ranked higher than No. 18. There were a number of these, foremost among which were the Thirteenth and Twenty-third Street schools. I applied at both, but they were full. The next in rank was No. 14, in Twenty-seventh Street near Third Avenue, where they admitted me to the fourth class. I gladly accepted this comparative demotion, so as to utilize advantageously the two years remaining before I reached the college-entrance age, began my studies there in March of ’68, under Miss Rosina Hartman, a fine old spinster and a good teacher, and finished both her class and the third class before I was twelve.