"I began at last to experiment upon myself,--to do things that were dangerous merely to see whether I dared do them; but the result was only partially reassuring. I could not get into much danger in a sleepy little village like Norwalk, Ohio, and although I found I could force myself to walk around the six-inch stone coping of a bell-tower five stories from the ground (a most perilous and foolhardy exploit), and go and sit alone in a graveyard in the middle of dark, still nights, I failed to recover my own respect. My self-reproach continued for a year or two, during which I was as wretched as a boy can be who admires courage above all things and has a high ideal of intrepid manhood, but who secretly fears that he himself is hopelessly weak and nerveless. There was hardly a day that I did not say to myself, 'You'll never be able to do the things that you dream about; you haven't any self-reliance or nerve. Even as a little child you were afraid of the dark; you shrink now from fights and rows, and you turn faint at the mere sight of blood. You're nothing but a coward.' "At last, when I was seventeen or eighteen years of age, I went to Cincinnati as a telegraph operator. I had become so morbid and miserable by that time that I said one day, 'I'm going to put an end to this state of affairs here and now. If I'm afraid of anything, I'll conquer my fear of it or die. If I'm a coward I might as well be dead, because I can never feel any self-respect or have any happiness in life; and I'd rather get killed trying to do something that I'm afraid to do than to live in this way.' I was at that time working at night, and had to go home from the office between midnight and four o'clock A. M. It was during the Civil War, and Cincinnati was a more lawless city than it has ever been since. Street robberies and murders were of daily occurrence, and all of the 'night men' in our office carried weapons as a matter of course. I bought a revolver, and commenced a course of experiments upon myself. When I finished my night work at the office, instead of going directly home through well-lighted and police-patrolled streets, I directed my steps to the slums and explored the worst haunts of vice and crime in the city. If there was a dark, narrow, cut-throat alley down by the river that I felt afraid to go through at that hour of the night, I clenched my teeth, cocked my revolver, and went through it,--sometimes twice in succession. If I read in the morning papers that a man had been robbed or murdered on a certain street, I went to that street the next night. I explored the dark river-banks, hung around low drinking-dives and the resorts of thieves and other criminals, and made it an invariable rule to do at all hazards the thing that I thought I might be afraid to do. Of course I had all sorts of experiences and adventures. One night I saw a man attacked by highwaymen and knocked down with a slung-shot, just across the street.