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This fact was new to me, but I raised my voice with celerity and piped thereafter in an exceedingly shrill key. After the usual humdrum opening remarks, in which he acknowledged with extreme good nature his age as fifty-five years, and that he was born in Erie county, O., of Dutch parentage, the family having emigrated to America in 1730, the particulars began to grow more interesting. His great-grandfather, I learned, was a banker of high standing in New York; and, when Thomas was but a child of seven years, the family fortune suffered reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age, and that the family should move from his birth-place to Michigan.

“Did you enjoy mathematics as a boy?” I asked.

“Not much,” he replied. “I tried to read Newton’s ‘Principia’ at the age of eleven. That disgusted me with pure mathematics, and I don’t wonder now. I should not have been allowed to take up such serious work.”

“You were anxious to learn?”

“Yes, indeed. I attempted to read through the entire Free Library at Detroit, but other things interfered before I had done.”

“Were you a book-worm and dreamer?” I questioned.

“Not at all,” he answered, using a short, jerky method, as though he were unconsciously checking himself up. “I became a newsboy, and liked the work. Made my first coup as a newsboy.”

“What was it?” I ventured.

“I bought up on ‘futures’ a thousand copies of the ‘Detroit Free Press’ containing important war news—gained a little time on my rivals, and sold the entire batch like hot cakes. The price reached twenty-five cents a copy before the end of the route,” and he laughed. “I ran the ‘Grand Trunk Herald,’ too, at that time—a little paper I issued from the train.”