Neither riches nor poverty had put a shaping hand to it.

The only child of his widowed mother, he had lived in one of the smaller manufacturing cities of New England a life such as falls to most lads.

Unquestionably he had been rather more shielded from several forms of temptation than had most of his playmates, for his mother's isolation had made him not merely her son, but very largely her companion.

In certain ways this had tended to make him more manly than the average fellow of his age, but in others it had retarded his development; and this backwardness had been further accentuated by a deliberate mind, which hardly kept pace with his physical growth.

His school record was fair: "Painstaking, but slow," was the report in studies.