This fact was new to me, but I raised my voice with celerity and piped
thereafter in an exceedingly shrill key. After the usual humdrum
opening remarks, in which he acknowledged with extreme good nature his
age as fifty-five years, and that he was born in Erie county, O., of
Dutch parentage, the family having emigrated to America in 1730, the
particulars began to grow more interesting. His great-grandfather, I
learned, was a banker of high standing in New York; and, when Thomas
was but a child of seven years, the family fortune suffered reverses
so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner
at an unusually early age, and that the family should move from his
birth-place to Michigan.
“Did you enjoy mathematics as a boy?” I asked.
“Not much,” he replied. “I tried to read Newton’s ‘Principia’ at the
age of eleven. That disgusted me with pure mathematics, and I don’t
wonder now. I should not have been allowed to take up such serious
work.”
“You were anxious to learn?”
“Yes, indeed. I attempted to read through the entire Free Library at
Detroit, but other things interfered before I had done.”
“Were you a book-worm and dreamer?” I questioned.
“Not at all,” he answered, using a short, jerky method, as though he
were unconsciously checking himself up. “I became a newsboy, and liked
the work. Made my first _coup_ as a newsboy.”
“What was it?” I ventured.
“I bought up on ‘futures’ a thousand copies of the ‘Detroit Free Press’
containing important war news,—gained a little time on my rivals, and
sold the entire batch like hot cakes. The price reached twenty-five
cents a copy before the end of the route,” and he laughed. “I ran the
‘Grand Trunk Herald,’ too, at that time—a little paper I issued from
the train.”