"How he saved a few cents I've never rightly known, for he was mum about it. What I think is, he must have begged till he had a half-dozen nickels or dimes. Then he bought newspapers, and sold 'em in the streets. From the first minute he was a success, and it's not hard to see why. He was in a different class from the poor dirty brats in the same business. And if ye'll believe it, me girl, there was times when the child kept the two of us on what he earned. From that day we never looked back. He put spirit into me, and the heart to work. Now, I'll turn over a page in the album, and show you our boy at the age of ten. What d'ye think of him?" "He doesn't look like a seller of newspapers," said Marise. "No more he wasn't, by then. He and I had gone into the molasses candy business. We made the candy ourselves; and if I do say it, there wasn't its equal in New York. Johnny would have the stuff wrapped up in pretty little packets of coloured paper tied with gold string, and I tell you, it went like smoke! At night, Johnny attended a school, and picked up knowledge as a chicken picks up corn. "Now, here he is in the album again at fifteen. We had the Mooney Molasses Candies--three sorts--for sale in a lot of shops, and we'd a little flat of our own, and money in the bank. Isn't he a fine fellow to look at there? The makings of a man! 'Twas when he was fifteen that he began to study the notebooks his father had left, and to turn his thoughts to inventions of his own. The first thing was an oyster-opener. The second was a fastener to keep shoe-strings from untying. Then there was a big leap, and at eighteen he'd patented a toy pistol that fired six shots, and no danger in one of 'em! That was what began to bring _real_ money in; and Johnny said, 'Mothereen' (he'd called me that name from the first), 'the next step is goin' to take us out West to the place that you love!' So it did! 'Twas that high-speed bullet of his which won him the notice of the War Office. It won him ten thousand dollars, too; and on the strength of it he brought me back to the town where Pat and I settled first, in the happy old days. But little did I dream even then of the destiny ahead of the boy! I was lovin' him too much, and rememberin' the child he'd been, to realise that by me side a real genius was growin' up. I might o' done, though, if I'd kept me eyes open, the way he studied and worked, worked and studied, readin' the classics and learnin' languages and mathematics the while he'd be faggin' out some new invention. But Johnny was never the boy to brag or talk about himself. He was always queer in spots, sort of broodin', you'd almost say sulky, unless you knew him, and a temper, too; though never with me. Then came his discovery of how to make motor spirit out of coke. That finished buildin' this house we're in, and bought his land at Grand Canyon. I mean it did all that in the first few months. Soon afterwards the dollars poured on us by thousands--yes, tens of