The Making of an American | Page 7

and
the deacon in the village church where they lived. He was the exact
opposite of my uncle: hard, unlovely, but deeply religious. The two
were neighbors and quarrelled about their fence-line. For months they
did not speak. On Sunday the deacon strode by on his way to church,
and my uncle, who stayed home, improved the opportunity to point out
of what stuff those Pharisees were made, much to his own edification.
Easter week came. In Denmark it is, or was, custom to go to
communion once a year, on Holy Thursday, if at no other season, and, I
might add, rarely at any other. On Wednesday night, the deacon
appeared, unbidden, at my uncle's door, craving an interview. If a
spectre had suddenly walked in, I do not suppose he could have lost his
wits more completely. He recovered them with an effort, and bidding
his guest welcome, led him courteously to his office.
From that interview he came forth a changed man. Long years after I
heard the full story of it from my uncle's own lips. It was simple
enough. The deacon said that duty called him to the communion table
on the morrow, and that he could not reconcile it with his conscience to
go with hate toward his neighbor in his heart. Hence he had come to
tell him that he might have the line as he claimed it. The spark struck

fire. Then and there they made up and were warm friends, though
agreeing in nothing, till they died. "The faith," said my uncle in telling
of it, "that could work in that way upon such a nature, is not to be made
light of." And he never did after that. He died a believing man.
It may be that it contributed something to the ordinarily democratic
relations of the upper-class men and the tradespeople that the latter
were generally well-to-do, while the officials mostly had a running
fight of it with their incomes. My father's salary had to reach around to
a family of fourteen, nay, fifteen, for he took his dead sister's child
when a baby and brought her up with us, who were boys all but one.
Father had charge of the Latin form, and this, with a sense of grim
humor, caused him, I suppose, to check his children off with the Latin
numerals, as it were. The sixth was baptized Sextus, the ninth Nonus,
though they were not called so, and he was dissuaded from calling the
twelfth Duodecimus only by the certainty that the other boys would
miscall him "Dozen." How I escaped Tertius I don't know. Probably the
scheme had not been thought of then. Poor father! Of the whole
fourteen but one lived to realize his hopes of a professional career, only
to die when he had just graduated from the medical school. My oldest
brother went to sea; Sophus, the doctor, was the next; and I, when it
came my time to study in earnest, refused flatly and declared my wish
to learn the carpenter's trade. Not till thirty years after did I know how
deep the wound was I struck my father then. He had set his heart upon
my making a literary career, and though he was very far from lacking
sympathy with the workingman--I rather think that he was the one link
between the upper and lower strata in our town in that way, enjoying
the most hearty respect of both--yet it was a sad disappointment to him.
It was in 1893, when I saw him for the last time, that I found it out, by
a chance remark he dropped when sitting with my first book, "How the
Other Half Lives," in his hand, and also the sacrifice he had made of his
own literary ambitions to eke out by hack editorial work on the local
newspaper a living for his large family. As for me, I would have been
repaid for the labor of writing a thousand books by witnessing the pride
he took in mine. There was at last a man of letters in the family, though
he came by a road not down on the official map.

[Illustration: Father.]
Crying over spilt milk was not my father's fashion, however. If I was to
be a carpenter, there was a good one in town, to whom I was forthwith
apprenticed for a year. During that time, incidentally, I might make up
my mind, upon the evidence of my reduced standing, that school was,
after all, to be preferred. And thus it was that I came to be a working
boy helping build her proud father's factory at the time I fell head over
heels in love with sweet Elizabeth. Certainly I had taken no easy road
to the winning of