them and thought my Mother tyrannical for Hmiting me to fourteen 

 apples a day! 



It is usually very difficult to fix the turning points of one's life, the 

 parting of the ways which was to determine all one's future. For me, 

 however, the month of June in 1870 and again in 1876, had that de- 

 cisive character. In 1870 I first met my future wife, AHce Post, a niece of 

 my Uncle Wistar's wife. Almost from the first meeting, I determined to 

 marry her, though she was only ten years old and I a small boy of 

 twelve. That marriage was the crowning good fortune and blessing of 

 my Hfe, but it is not fitting that I should enlarge upon it here. Of course, 

 in those early days, no one took it seriously but myself and it earned 

 me an unmerciful lot of teasing, but I meant it and stuck to it, with the 

 happiest results. 



Needless to say, I remember the Franco-Prussian War very fully. 

 Everything combined to make us pro-German and anti-French; even 

 my cult of the great Napoleon, which was formed and nourished by 

 J. S. C. Abbot's absurd biography, did not hold out against the pressure 

 of family and community opinion. The years that my Grandfather spent 

 in Germany, as a young man, had a profound effect upon him and made 

 him friendly to all things German so long as he lived. Louis Napoleon's 

 Mexican adventure and his hostility to our government in the Civil 

 War were not forgotten, but the chief cause of our sympathy with Ger- 

 many was due to the belief then held by all the world that France was 

 the aggressor. How skilfully Bismarck had manoeuvered France into 

 a false position and made the war inevitable was not known for a 

 generation later. 



The swift and ruthless course of the victorious German armies not 

 only amazed us, but frightened us a Httle, as if with some dim, far-off 

 premonition of the horrors that were to come in 1914. After the fall of 

 the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic, American opinion 

 began to veer toward the unfortunate French. For some unexplained 

 reason, the New Yor\ World was violently anti-German and every day 

 printed stories of imaginary French victories, until that course became 

 too ridiculous to be kept up any longer. 



The three years, 1870 to 1873, were a homogenous and uneventful 

 period of my life. I was in school, or with tutors, preparing in a very 

 inadequate way for college, working hard under teachers who were 

 mostly incompetent. In summer, with older companions, I did a lot of 

 swimming and took my soHtary rides. In 1871 my second brother, Hugh 

 Lenox, received an appointment to West Point, thus beginning the re- 



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