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Each player had his favorite shooting marble, of agate or onyx or glass; these were our taws, which we believed were fraught with what we had of luck. When your turn came to shoot, you'd take your taw and knuckle down on the edge of the ring. Any marble you knocked out of the ring you kept, and then took another shot. The trick was to keep yourself in position. I could make my taw obey me like a billiard ball. If you hit a marble squarely, your taw stayed at the point of contact, spinning away its momentum until it stopped. The men might play for money, but when kids played, the only prizes were those little plaster "keesters," which, in the big game, were always new and clean. That is why we liked to play with the men. They bought their marbles at the store, paying real money for them.

Us kids supplied ourselves with marbles by winning from the men. Neither Ed nor I ever saw the day, in our boyhood, when we dared spend good money for marbles. A German sense of thrift was our standard in such matters. We got that not from our father but from our mother. Although she was born in Rocheport, Missouri, her background, her feeling, her instincts were German. She spoke German to us when my father was not around; it was long since a strange tongue to him, but we children could understand and speak it with her. Now I have forgotten almost all my German, but this I do remember: In her tenderest moods my mother's words came boiling out of her in German.