Adventure Comes Early
OFTEN I have had to sit on a lecture platform when I was going to speak, and listen to a long introduction. It bored me stiff and likewise the audience. I wanted to get at the business in hand and the job I came for. That's the way I feel about this book. It is the story of a life in which I have had a lot of fun and excitement.
So I'm going to begin the tale as quickly as possible without going back into an account of my ancestry and family. Apropos of which George Putnam quotes the remark of a visiting author to his uncle: "Major Putnam, the matter of ancestry is all very interesting. Only, the present is so much more important than the past.
I always think people who are too much concerned with the pedigree of their forefathers are apt to be like potatoes the best part of them is underground."
Of my early days there will be just enough to give a background for what follows. I don't think anyone except myself would give a tinker's damn about those boyhood years. As a rule, nothing of much interest happens to a young man until he is out of college. One chapter ought to suffice for the essential preliminaries.
I was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, at approximately two o'clock in the morning of January 26, 1884, when the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. I am told that my eyes were so slanted that when Father first looked at me he said, "Why, I've begot a Chinaman!" That remark was current in our family long before, in later life, I went to China to live for eighteen years.
Beloit lay on the banks of the Rock River in a part of southern Wisconsin that was all fields and woods and rushing streams. I was like a rabbit, happy only when I could run out of doors. To stay in the house was torture to me then, and it has been ever since.
Whatever the weather, in sun or rain, calm or storm, day or night, I was outside, unless my parents almost literally locked me in.
The greatest event of my early life was when, on my ninth birthday, Father gave me a little single-barrel shotgun. Previous to this I had been allowed to shoot Grandfather's muzzle loader once or twice, but it was too much for me to negotiate with its forty-inch-long barrel.