But there was in him
an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to
master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising
Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him
tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by investing the
small sum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling
himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence
schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and
scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the
work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a
collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his
daily training--an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame
through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble
clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of
the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls
of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at
his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules
and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an
important Eastern railroad.
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