At the time of my first offense I was a member of a flourishing Dramatic Society and I have a very distinct memory of my rage when at length the worms turned and one of my fellow members arose at a meeting and firmly moved the chair that in future the club devote its energies to performing plays written by some one besides Owen Davis. This was my first experience of dramatic criticism; my second came some fifteen years later, fifteen years during which I am afraid I had drifted away from the worship of the drama and directed myself with equal enthusiasm to playing ball with such rare and occasional intervals of study as seemed necessary to preserve the peace. The theater seemed very far away. My father at that time was the president of the Society of American Iron Manufacturers and had a small furnace at Kathodin Iron Works, a settlement in the Maine woods about fifty miles above Bangor; and after considerable conflict I was persuaded by my father that I had the makings in me of a great mining engineer. If I had not already stated that my sense of humor came to me from my mother’s side, this would be a good place to bring it in. When I was about fifteen, my father’s business took him to the Cumberland Mountains in the southern part of Kentucky and he took my mother and the younger children with him, sending my elder brother to Massachusetts Tech and me to Harvard. In 1889 there was no School of the Drama in Harvard, but I can’t recall that there was any great yearning on my part for one. For some queer reason the memory of the years I spent there is vague and shadowy. I was not old enough at the time to get the benefits of a great university, and, aside from the fact of being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard sprinter, I did little to distinguish myself. I was a wretched scholar; neither at that time nor at any other have I ever been able to do anything unless it happened to be the one thing I wanted to do, and I can’t recall that a high grade in any of my studies was at any time one of my ambitions. I went to the Boston theaters whenever I had money enough to get there and I saw all of the great plays and all of the actors of the day, but I worshiped them from a distance and had long ago ceased to hope that my life could in any way be devoted to anything aside from mining engineering. But as I have never been able to understand the simplest scientific problem and still retain a bland uncertainty as to how many times three goes in nine, I doubt if the engineering profession lost much when I later reverted to type.