What affects me more than all, is what relates to myself, for it has always been a habit of mine to bring everything to a personal test, to weigh it upon my own scales. These questions I have often asked, “Why was I created as I was, in a condition where I had to come in contact with vice in my earliest years? Why was I thrown on to the dirt heap of the world? If the all-wise, loving God, intended me to be pure in heart, why did He not with His almighty power create me where I could have had the best opportunities for a noble life?” My questions have never been answered. Another question might be asked that would be personal and from which I do not shrink. Why do I tell the story of my life that has so much of evil in it? If I told anything, what else could I tell but the truth? A man can only paint what he himself has felt. I have not told it with pride, but with the deepest humiliation. I have not rolled my story as a sweet morsel over my tongue. I have had a motive of good in the telling, to show up the wrongs I have suffered and to reveal the infamies of others who have made me suffer, as a warning, or as the theologians say when they excuse the scripture descriptions of the frailties and sins of the Bible worthies, that these are given as warning lessons to mankind. So I am on safe ground. But I have wandered again. I think I was speaking of my wife as my choicest treasure, the priceless painting of my life and home, which I wished to keep from every evil touch or injurious thought. This is why I never told her of the worst, the meanest parts of my life. With her I always followed the Hindu proverb, “Tell your troubles to your own mind, tell your happiness to the world.” An incident occurred to remind me again of the old subject. I tried to forget it and to do this more effectually, became absorbed in various things, yet doing our best we cannot always avoid the disagreeable. Even the best of roads will have holes in them. There is an irony in fate, something in our destiny that ever upsets our wisest endeavors, plan them as we will. I have frequently noticed that when I have congratulated myself on the smoothness of my life, the success of my plans, something suddenly came to upset them all. “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglee.”