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MY father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful,kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as afarm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near thetown of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own and on Saturdayevenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercoursewith other farm-hands. In town he drank several glasses of beer andstood about in Ben Head’s saloon—crowded on Saturday evenings withvisiting farm-hands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o’clock father drove home along a lonely country road, made hishorse comfortable for the night and himself went to bed, quite happy inhis position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to risein the world.

It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that fathermarried my mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happenedto the two people. They became ambitious. The American passion forgetting up in the world took possession of them.

It may have been that mother was responsible. Being aschool-teacher she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, Ipresume, read of how Garfield, Lincoln, and other Americans rose frompoverty to fame and greatness and as I lay beside her—in the days ofher lying-in—she may have dreamed that I would some day rule men andcities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as afarm-hand, sell his horse and embark on an independent enterprise ofhis own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubledgrey eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and myself shewas incurably ambitious.

The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on what was calledGriggs’s Road eight miles from Bidwell and launched into chickenraising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my firstimpressions of life there. From the beginning they were impressionsof disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the dark side of life, I attribute it to the fact thatwhat should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood werespent on a chicken farm.

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many andtragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg,lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will seepictured on Easter postcards, then becomes hideously naked, eatsquantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father’s brow,gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands lookingwith stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens andnow and then a rooster, intended to serve God’s mysterious ends,struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which comeother chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It isall unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised onchicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is sodreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on thejourney of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact sodreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in hisjudgements of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until yourexpectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of awagon—to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infesttheir youths, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. Inlater life I have seen how that a literature has been built up on thesubject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It isintended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of theknowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declaresthat much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you. Go hunt forgold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the honesty of apolitician, believe if you will that the world is daily growing betterand that good will triumph over evil but do not read and believe theliterature that is written concerning the hen. It was not written foryou.