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Early in our occupancy of the Second Avenue house, the back parlour had to be rented as a doctor’s office, and shortly after my mother decided that it was her duty to take in boarders. I cannot speak of my mother as she was during these trials without the deepest emotion. There is nobody to whom I owe so much; there was no debt which so profoundly affected my entire career. In Mannheim her position had always been one of comfort. I had seen her there with good friends, good books, good dramas, and good music; she was the mistress of a commodious house, with a corps of competent servants, in a city with every custom and tradition of which she was intimately familiar; respected by the community, the mother of thirteen children, she was calm, philosophic, considerate of every domestic call upon her, not only supervising our education, physical and mental, but also finding time to add continuously to her own broad culture. Now a complete change had come. She was a stranger in a strange land; most of her friends were new; the city of her husband’s adoption was a puzzle, its manners foreign, its language long almost unknown; there was small time for amusement; there was, on the contrary, the ever-constant and ever-pressing strain of helping, by her own endeavours, to make both ends meet.