He looked at me blankly.
“You’ll have to talk louder,” said an assistant who worked in another portion of the room; “he don’t hear well.”
HIS GRANDFATHER WAS A BANKER.
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.