My own childhood was so wonderfully casual and different! We lived on the outskirts of a small northwestern city--not in the country exactly, and not exactly in the slums. In those days the place had no slums, but it had outlying, semi-rural tracts where poor people built shanties and “squatted.” My parents neither built a shanty nor squatted, but they built a house that from time to time grew and rambled, and they lived there. They were able to live where they pleased, because in the community they were persons of importance. I, however, was not, and as children, especially boys, always play with the most available other children, unless they are told not to (and even then sometimes), and as I was never told not to, my only boy companions and intimate friends, until I was fourteen, were the boys of our neighborhood. At that time they were known to the élite as “the Elm street gang.” The ungraded road on which our house was situated had been named, with the usual subtlety of municipal authorities, “Elm Street,” because all of its trees were either scrub oak or maple. They were “the Elm street gang” in those days; to-day they would merely be known as “muckers.” It was with them that all my early years were spent, both in school and out. For at that time, if I remember rightly, the parochial schools (all my friends were Irish Roman Catholics) did not catch their pupils as young as they do now, and we all went to a yellow brick schoolhouse named after a Democratic president. To you it may not seem to be a matter of importance that until I was fourteen my only playmates and dearest friends were Irish muckers. To me it is of a significance that I could scarcely explain. For at an impressionable age I not only lived my own life--the life I was born to--in my own house and family, but quite as naturally and sincerely I lived the life of an Irish mucker. (This, to me, sounds like an unappreciative, a clumsy, almost a brutal way of stating it, but if I expressed it otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand.) I knew their families and loved them. I used to share not only their meals when I felt like it (they always tasted much better than our own), but their sorrows and their joys. Elm street and vicinity in those days was a little segment lifted in its entirety from the bogs of Ireland and set down in the Northwest, and, as I lived there, I very early in life became intimate with poverty, drunkenness and death. Before I was twelve I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place only in Irish fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces,