or a sheepskin volume of Lawson's "Leading
Cases in Equity." I was so mad to save every penny I could earn that
instead of buying myself food for luncheon, I ate molasses and
gingerbread that all but turned my stomach; and I was so eager to learn
my law that I did not take my sleep when I could get it. The result
was that I was stupid at my tasks, moody, melancholy, and so sensitive
that my employer's natural dissatisfaction with my work put me into
agonies of shame and despair of myself. I became, as the boys say,
"dopy." I remember that one night, after I had scrubbed the floors of
our offices, I took off the old trousers in which I had been working,
hung them in a closet, and started home; and it was not until the cold
wind struck my bare knees that I realized I was on the street in my
shirt. Often, when I was given a brief to work up for Mr. Thompson, I
would slave over it until the small hours of the morning and then, to
his disgust--and my unspeakable mortification--find that my work was
valueless, that I had not seized the fundamental points of the case, or
that I had built all my arguments on some misapprehension of the law.

Worse than that, I was unhappy at home. Poverty was fraying us all
out. If it was not exactly brutalizing us, it was warping us, breaking
our healths, and ruining our dispositions. My good mother--married out
of a beautiful Southern home where she had lived a life that (as I
remembered it) was all horseback rides and Negro servants--had started
out bravely in this debasing existence in a shanty, but it was wearing
her out. She was passing through a critical period of her life, and
she had no care, no comforts. I have often since been ashamed of
myself that I did not sympathize with her and understand her, but I was
too young to understand, and too miserable myself to sympathize. It
seemed to me that my life was not worth living--that every one had lost
faith in me--that I should never succeed in the law or anything
else--that I had no brains--that I should never do anything but scrub
floors and run messages. And after a day that had been more than
usually discouraging in the office and an evening of exasperated misery
at home, I got a revolver and some cartridges, locked myself in my
room, confronted myself desperately in the mirror, put the muzzle of
the loaded pistol to my temple, and pulled the trigger.

The hammer snapped sharply on the cartridge; a great wave of horror and