in debating at school. (Once, at Notre Dame, I
spoke for a full hour in successful defence of the proposition that
Colorado was the "greatest state in the Union," and proved at least
that I had a lawyer's "wind.") But I should probably have been a
lawyer who has learned his pleasant theories of life in the colleges.
And on the night that my father died, the crushing realities of poverty
put out an awful and compelling hand on me, and my struggle with them
began.

I was eighteen years old, the eldest of four children. I had been
"writing proofs" in the Denver land office, for claimants who had filed
on Government land; and I had saved $150 of my salary before my work
there ceased. I found, after my father's death, that this $150 was all
we had in the world, and $130 of it went for funeral expenses. His
life had been insured for $15,000, and we believed that the premiums
had all been paid, but we could not find the last receipt; the agent
denied having received the payment; the policy had lapsed on the day
before my father's death; and we got nothing. Our furniture had been
mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to furnish a little house
on Santa Fe Avenue; and later we moved to a cottage on lower West
Colfax Avenue, in which Negroes have since lived.

I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in a real estate office--as
office boy--and carried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before
the office opened, and did janitor work at night when it closed. After
a month of that, I got a better place, as office boy, with a mining
company, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, my younger brother
found work in a law office and I "swapped jobs" with him--because I
wished to study law!

It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who still practises in Denver;
and his example as an incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the
best and strongest influences of my life.

I had that one ambition--to be a lawyer. Associated with it I seem to
have had an unusual curiosity about politics. And where I got either
the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. My father's mother was
a Greenleaf,[1] and related to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence,"
but my father himself had nothing of the legal mind. As a boy, living
in Mississippi, he had joined the Confederate army when he was
preparing for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of
captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had