ley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story of his early
life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the
recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her
inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his
children. They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the
fashion of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their
children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's
Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham's
unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other
people would consider it sincere reporter's rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look at all these
facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying them. Sometimes
a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man
himself would never think of." He went on to put several queries, and
it was from Lapham's answers that he generalised the history of his
childhood. "Mr. Lapham, although he did not dwell on his boyish trials
and struggles, spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of
their reality." This was what he added in the interview, and by the
time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans are all
pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances, their sufferings, and
their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness of the check
he had received, and had him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his
autobiography.

"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to
interrupt again, "a man never sees all that his mother has been to him
till it's too late to let her know that he sees it. Why, my mother--"
he stopped. "It gives me a lump in the throat," he said
apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: "She was
a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate
school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and
boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made
and mended from daylight till dark--and from dark till daylight, I was
going to say; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep. But I
suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read
the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD. But
it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like
the