and aloof, is able to trace the myriad efforts
by which the little Johnnie or Nellie acquires a secure hold on the
disjointed parts of the huge plaything, life.

Now I was not exactly an infant when I was set down, on a May day some
fifteen years ago, in this pleasant nursery of America. I had long
since acquired the use of my faculties, and had collected some bits of
experience practical and emotional, and had even learned to give an
account of them. Still, I had very little perspective, and my
observations and comparisons were superficial. I was too much carried
away to analyze the forces that were moving me. My Polotzk I knew well
before I began to judge it and experiment with it. America was
bewilderingly strange, unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored.
I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked
eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we
here?--not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I
now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament
of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he
was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled
that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet,
on wings, winds and American machines,--I have leaped and run and
climbed and crawled,--but to tell which step came after which I find a
puzzling matter. Plenty of maiden aunts were present during my second
infancy, in the guise of immigrant officials, school-teachers,
settlement workers, and sundry other unprejudiced and critical
observers. Their statistics I might properly borrow to fill the gaps
in my recollections, but I am prevented by my sense of harmony. The
individual, we know, is a creature unknown to the statistician,
whereas I undertook to give the personal view of everything. So I am
bound to unravel, as well as I can, the tangle of events, outer and
inner, which made up the first breathless years of my American life.

During his three years of probation, my father had made a number of
false starts in business. His history for that period is the history
of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands
untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of
repression in their native land. Dozens of these men pass under your
eyes every day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest
affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them