ive you a letter
of introduction to him." And thus began T.'s prosperity. He now lives in a
beautiful home on a wide boulevard. His invention, still short of
perfection, but highly valuable, is coming slowly into use, and would
probably be in very widespread use were it not for the fact that he is
constantly working on it, perfecting it, improving it, and hoping finally
to have a complete solution to the problem.

CHAPTER VIII

THE IMPRACTICAL MAN

"My life is a failure," wrote Sydney Williams to us, "and I do not know
why."

In middle life my grandfather Williams moved his family across the Potomac
River from Virginia in order to study to enter the ministry. He is said to
have freed some slaves at that time, so he must have been a 'planter,' He
became a Congregational minister. My grandfather Jacobs was a carpenter;
but, as I knew him, and for some years before my birth, he was a helpless
invalid from paralysis on one side.

My father graduated from college and then became a minister. He preached
for many years, then he took up work with a religious publishing house,
finally having charge of the work at St. Paul. He was there, I believe,
when he was elected president of a small school for girls. He assumed his
new duties in June and I was born the following November. (I am the
youngest of eleven children, of whom there are now three boys and five
girls still living, three boys having died while still babies before my
birth.)

Until I was nearly twelve years old we lived at the girls' school, which
father succeeded in greatly enlarging. Mother taught me to read a little
and write a little. She and others read to me a great deal. I had no
playmates except my nephews and nieces, to whom I was continually being
pointed out as a 'model.' Out of the sight of the grown-ups, I was not
always such a model as they could have wished; yet I did feel a certain
amount of responsibility that was oppressive and repressive. When nearly
eleven, I was sent to the public school, where I was soon promoted with
two others. The next year father and mother moved into a larger town, so
that I had a few months of real home life before my father's death in
April, 1893.

Then my mother, her mother, and I went to Wisconsin to live with a
married sister of mine whose husband was the Presbyterian minister there.
I entered the fourth grade of the public school that fall; but, by the end
of the school year, I had completed the fifth g