iness and everything else worth having. When I wish
to sound out a man, I ask him if he has ever been hungry. If I find
he has never missed a meal in his life, I know his education has been
neglected. For I believe that experience is the foremost teacher. I
have learned something from every experience I ever had, and I hold that
Providence has been kind to me in favoring me with a lot of rather tough
adventures.

Our hardships on entering America taught me sympathy and filled me with
a desire to help others. I have heard aliens say that America had not
treated them with hospitality, and that this had made them bitter, and
now these aliens would take revenge by tearing down America. This is
a lie that can not fool me. My hardships did not turn me bitter. And I
know a thousand others who had harder struggles than I. And none of them
showed the yellow streak. The Pilgrim Fathers landed in the winter when
there were no houses. Half of them perished from hardship in a single
year. Did they turn anarchists?

The man who says that hard sledding in America made a yellow cur out
of him fools no one. He was born a yellow cur. Hard sledding in America
produced the man who said: "With malice toward none; with charity for
all."

CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST REGULAR JOB

We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to
Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman,
knowing his desperate need of money, let him take his furnace for a few
days and earn enough money to move on to Pittsburgh. There father found
a job again, but mother was dissatisfied with the crowded conditions in
Pittsburgh. She wanted to bring up her boys amid open fields.

In those days the air was black with soot and the crowded quarters where
the workers lived offered no room for gardens. Mother wanted sunlight
and green grass such as we had about Tredegar. There Lord Tredegar had
his beautiful castle in the midst of a park. On certain days this great
park was open to the villagers, and the children came to picnic,
and Lord Tredegar gave them little cakes and tea in doll-size cups.
Doubtless he looked upon us as "my people."

But the lords of steel in Pittsburgh were too new at the game to
practice the customs of the nobility in beautifying their surroundings.
The mills had made things ugly and the place was not what mother thought
it ought to be for bringing up children. So father took us back to
Sharon, and there we ha