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We children did not lose a day in our pursuit of education; for on the very day of our removal to Manhattan, I attended Grammar School No. 18, in Fifty-first Street near Lexington Avenue. At recess-time we boys used to play “tag” on the foundations of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the construction of which had been stopped during the Civil War. I have very pleasant recollections of my early grammar school teachers, and especially of one who later was for years Clerk of the Board of Education, the efficient Lawrence D. Kiernan, who, while at School 18, was elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the “Young Democrats” and whose talks to us pupils on civic duty seemed like great orations and gave me my first impression of independence in politics.

Nevertheless, I laboured under two disadvantages—one was my English; the difference in structure between my native and my adopted language gave me considerable trouble; so did the pronunciation of the letters w and d, but my greatest difficulty was the diphthong th, and to overcome it, I compiled and learned lists of words in which it occurred and for weeks devoted some time, night and morning, to repeating: “Theophilus Thistle, the great thistle-sifter, sifted one sieve-full of unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb.” However, as the greatest stress was laid on proficiency in arithmetic, and as I had a natural aptitude for that study, my proficiency there balanced these deficiencies and took me into the highest class at the age of eleven.