Plenty of maiden aunts were present during my second infancy, in the guise of immigrant officials, school-teachers, settlement workers, and sundry other unprejudiced and critical observers.

Their statistics I might properly borrow to fill the gaps in my recollections, but I am prevented by my sense of harmony.

The individual, we know, is a creature unknown to the statistician, whereas I undertook to give the personal view of everything.

So I am bound to unravel, as well as I can, the tangle of events, outer and inner, which made up the first breathless years of my American life.
During his three years of probation, my father had made a number of false starts in business.

His history for that period is the history of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in their native land.