He also, in a letter from France, quoted with much relish the remark of Father Francis P. Duffy that he was “half German and half human.” English and Scotch strains made up another half or three quarters. The English goes straight back to one Thomas Kilburne, church warden at Wooddilton, near Newmarket, in Cambridgeshire, who came to Connecticut in 1638. The “e” was lost apparently in Massachusetts, and the word became, as in his mother’s maiden name, Kilburn. Soldier blood, too, flowed in his veins--though it is likely that this fact for the first time occurred to him, if at all, when his nature rose white-hot to arms. He was, so to say, a Colonial Dame on both sides, as members of both his father’s and his mother’s family fought in the American Revolution; and members of his father’s family in the French and Indian wars. Alfred Joyce Kilmer (as he was christened) was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, December 6, 1886, son of Annie Kilburn and Frederick Kilmer. Though he seems always to have been, in familiar address and allusion, called Joyce, the Alfred did not disappear from his address and signature until he began, as more or less of a professional writer, to publish his work, when it went the way of the Newton in Mr. Tarkington’s name, and the Enoch in Mr. Bennett’s. Then “Joyce Kilmer” acquired a fine humorous disdain for what he regarded as the florid note in literary signatures of three words (or, worse still to his mind, the A. Joyce kind of thing); and he enjoyed handing down, with much relish of the final and judicial character of his utterance, the opinion that the proper sort of a trademark, so to say, for success in letters was something short, pointed, easy to say and to remember, such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Joseph Conrad, and so on through illustrations carried, at length, to intentionally infuriating numbers. As a small boy, Kilmer is described by those who knew him then as the “funniest” small boy they ever saw, by which is meant, apparently, that he was an odd spectacle. And this, of course, is so altogether in line with literary tradition that it would have been odd if he had not been an oddity in the way of a spectacle. He wore queer clothes, it seems, ordinary stockings with bicycle breeches, and that sort of thing. He didn’t altogether fit in somehow, couldn’t find himself, was somewhat of an outsider among the juvenile clans; he was required to fight other boys a good deal; he evidenced a pronounced inability to comprehend anything at all of arithmetic; and somewhere between eight and twelve (so the report goes) he contracted a violent passion for a lady, of about thirty-five, who was his teacher at school; a passion which endured for a considerable time, and became a hilarious legend among the youth about him of jocose humour.