I know now that I fully deserved all that I received, and more, too.

My father was certainly in those days a most patient man.

I have recorded the fact elsewhere that I was as averse to work as I was to study, and I had a way of avoiding it at times that was peculiarly my own.
While I was still a boy in Marshalltown and before I had graduated ( ?) from either the State University or the college of Notre Dame, my father kept a hotel known as the Anson House.

The old gentleman was at that tune the possessor of a silver watch, and to own that watch was the height of my ambition.

Time and again I begged him to give it to me, but he had turned a deaf ear to my importunities.
In the back yard of the hotel one day when I had been begging him for the gift harder than usual, there stood a huge pile of wood that needed splitting, and looking at this he remarked, that I could earn the watch if I chose by doing the task.