CHAPTER I

SOMETIMES, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual
way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing
short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of
poverty and I arrived in America--in 1885--with four cents in my
pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and
recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the
cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a
look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the
same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power,
the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of
it, seem to be devoid of significance

When I was young I used to think that middle-aged people recalled
their youth as something seen through a haze. I know better now.
Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be. The last years that I
spent in my native land and my first years in America come back
to me with the distinctness of yesterday. Indeed, I have a better
recollection of many a trifle of my childhood days than I have of
some important things that occurred to me recently. I have a good
memory for faces, but I am apt to recognize people I have not
seen for a quarter of a century more readily than I do some I used
to know only a few years ago

I love to brood over my youth. The dearest days in one's life are
those that seem very far and very near at once. My wretched
boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother.