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My father's salary had to
reach around to a family of fourteen, nay, fifteen, for he took
his dead sister's child when a baby and brought her up with us,
who were boys all but one. Father had charge of the Latin form, and
this, with a sense of grim humor, caused him, I suppose, to check
his children off with the Latin numerals, as it were. The sixth
was baptized Sextus, the ninth Nonus, though they were not called
so, and he was dissuaded from calling the twelfth Duodecimus only
by the certainty that the other boys would miscall him "Dozen." How
I escaped Tertius I don't know. Probably the scheme had not been
thought of then. Poor father! Of the whole fourteen but one lived
to realize his hopes of a professional career, only to die when
he had just graduated from the medical school. My oldest brother
went to sea; Sophus, the doctor, was the next; and I, when it came
my time to study in earnest, refused flatly and declared my wish
to learn the carpenter's trade. Not till thirty years after did
I know how deep the wound was I struck my father then.


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