Owen Davis when he entered Harvard in 1889 ] I had been born, however, with the smell of the stage in my nostrils and was as stage-struck before I ever saw a stage as I am to-day after almost thirty-five years, during which I have seen very little else and have bitterly resented the few hours I have passed in any other atmosphere. [Illustration: “Aside from being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard sprinter, I did little to distinguish myself.” Winning the 100-yard dash at Harvard in May, 1891. ] This hunger for the glamorous and the romantic surely did not come to me from the staid New England farmers and lawyers whose lives had been devoted to the stern necessity of grubbing an existence out of the rather stubborn soil of Maine and Vermont; but, on my mother’s side there were certain bold Yanks who had sailed the seas on some of the clipper ships that in those days were built and manned along the coast of Maine. To my mother then, and through her to some adventurer of the deep, I owe the fact that I have never in my life wanted to do, and in truth I never have done, any of the practical, humdrum work of this extremely practical world, but have remained perfectly content to make faces at life and earn my living by drawing pictures on the wall. If I am right in my opinion that these bad habits of mine came to me from my mother, I must absolve her from the blame of not handing me at the same time some of her own stern pains to repress them. Whatever her dreams had been, her realities were practical enough and she was one of the many victims of one of life’s modest ironies—a woman who gave so much of herself that the future of her eight children should be what she wanted it to be that she died, still fighting, instead of ever sharing in the success we owe so greatly to her. Success in life is a difficult thing to estimate. My mother, I am afraid, had little of the thrill of romantic adventure that I knew her spirit craved. Indeed, so far as I know, she had no time and no desire to think of herself at all, and she died before she could be sure that her ambitions for her children would ever be satisfied. Yet I think she was a successful woman. My recollections of these days, stimulated by this message in her faded handwriting, vaguely recall a long line of literary monstrosities of about the same date, and when my own boys, at about some such absurd age, showed symptoms of having been bitten by some wandering bacteria of the drama, I had an advantage over my father and at once recognized the symptoms. Like other dread diseases I knew this one to be incurable, the only treatment being to give the patient plenty of nourishing food, against the time when he will have difficulty in getting it for himself, keep him as cheerful as possible, and hope for the worst.