An offer from my father’s brother, who had become rich in mercantile business, drew my father and the family in my fifth year to the city of Philadelphia. With this change of base came sharper tactics against the army of poverty; and at last, by fighting it on the same line, although it took all the summer of his life, he achieved the victory. I was then sent to the best schools; took lessons at home in some branches from a private teacher; took—I own it now—lessons in other branches privately, out of the house, without my father’s knowledge, although at his expense for the tuition; and at last I went to college. Hard study, matched by an irrepressible love of pranks at night; a knowledge of Euclid’s lines and clothes line; of belles-lettres and unlettered belles; of geometrical and other squares; of chemistry applied to known uses and to experiments for which there were no precedents in the books; prizes offered by the faculty, and prizes offered by Mrs. Green and Mrs. White in the persons of their handsome daughters,—these all braided together the threads of my university life into a pattern which, if not unusual, was made up principally of figures little admired at home. My father was not at all pleased with the well-red bill I brought with me, and quite as little with the unsigned ones which followed me, from college; and, concluding that I might run my own face for a while, set his sharply against me. I took to teaching; sounding over again the shallow depths of old studies, but often striking the lead on the rocky bottom of a temper too long indulged not to be stern when touched by children’s thoughtlessness. My father’s death cast upon me responsibilities for my mother and the estate, which dropped the curtain upon my dream-life, and lifted it from the long perspective of actual work and business cares. Among my father’s papers I found the following original document, which I reproduce here, as showing his shrewdness of observation, and the character of the parent who helped to form some elements of my own. “A NEW AMERICAN DECALOGUE. “Hear, O Jonathan, the commandments which thou hast made,—teaching them to thy infants, thy Freedmen, thy Irishmen, thy office-holders,—the asses within thy gates. I. “Thou shalt have no other God but Gain. Trade, and labor, husband-ry and all other brokerage, shall be his profits. II. “Graven images and pictures other than greenbacks and fractional currency thou shalt not make. “These shalt continue to be unlike anything elsewhere, in the heavens above or in the earth beneath; and to them, therefore, thou mayst bow down thyself unto the thirty-third or thirty-fourth generation, using up in their pursuit all thy soles, thy health, and thy neighbor as thyself. III.